What may be difficult for non-Americans to understand (and took me a while to really clue into) is that this country experiences two social phenomena which most don't (and which in particular are mostly unknown in the other English speaking countries - Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand - where most non-Americans on livejournal come from).

First, there is a large and *growing* division in US society on culture and social values. Basically, first and foremost this election was a victory OF "social conservatives". Not FOR them - Bush's crowd are your standard big- business authoritarians in action, their main real policies involve tax cuts, corporate gifts, wars, and boosting the police state. They make noises in the direction of church in state, abortion bans, gay marriage bans, and so forth but their full attention is on foreign policy and economic policy.

But the fact is the US has reached a stage where a huge amount of the population could not care less about foreign policy and economic policy. Their ideal world is a 1950s sitcom of a white anglo-saxon protestant nuclear family with a white picket fence and 2.1 heterosexual kids. Conservative social values. They don't like gay people, they resent any policies that appear to favor visible minorities, they dislike the world outside the borders of the US except as a tourist destination, they are uncomfortable with women in nontraditional roles, they don't like abortion or "unnatural" reproductive technologies, etc. It used to be that these people were mostly the religious right - a group FAR larger and stronger in the US than anywhere else in the rest of the western world, with their own "seperate culture" of radio and TV stations and books. But that wasn't really the case in this election. The religious right turned out for Bush in droves, but in terms of actual numbers they're not really growing. The religious right was just as big, and in fact better organized, in the 90s when it was fighting against Clinton. But in the 90s against Clinton, the religious right was too alone in its fight, so it couldn't elect a president.

What played the swing role in this election was the fastest growing social/political demographic in the US - for lack of a better term, the SUV right. For about the past fifteen years, the dominant political trend in the US hasn't involved the traditional left or right. The hard right and the religious conservatives (about 1/4 of the population) have not become more numerous. The liberal/left crowd (about 1/4 of the population as well) also have not grown. What has happened is a large shift in the nature of what's in between - the moderates, the middle.

The middle of the road American used to be more of a "small town" type - somewhat socially conservative, moderately religious, but also engaged in their community, valuing their neighbors, and generally with an ethic of working toward the collective good. These old community-oriented moderates were not liberal, but a lot of them could be counted on to oppose the divisiveness and hatefullness of the far right, and to support social welfare policies rather than tax slashing and corporate gifts.

That demographic is rapidly dying off and being replaced by the stereotypical SUV-driving suburbanite. Someone who is not socially conservative in the traditional sense of being a community-oriented family values person, but is in fact fairly individualistic and alienated. No strong religious beliefs, no real community membership, focused on keep- ahead-of-the-joneses consumer competition. This kind of person is defined by individualistic competition - they believe that it's a dog-eat-dog world, that everyone is out for themselves, and that they need to be strong in the face of this world. The combination of competitiveness, suburban conventionality, and alienation from any real communities tends to make them very xenophobic. The SUV right doesn't bible thump, and doesn't necessarily hate "liberals" automatically like the hard right does, but in many ways it is the most xenophobic of all demographics. It's full of angry white people, especially non-college-educated white men, who see that they're not doing so well economically and instead of blaming it on the economic system they turn their resentment to racial minorities (who still do worse, but who have certainly been gaining on that poor/lower middle class white demographic while the white guys are standing still). It's full of people who hate gays, because they're different and they hate pretty much anyone who is different. It's full of people whose attitude to the rest of the world is "they're out to get us or exploit us, so we have to look out for number one" because that's their attitude to so much of life in general. It's full of people who think the natural order of things is for men to be dominant over women - the predominance of this group is why sexist beliefs (such as the man should be the head of his household) INCREASED among the US population in the 1990s. Although crime wasn't an issue in this election, the SUV right is full of people who believe that in a dog-eat-dog world deviance should be punished harshly, and thus support harsh anti-crime measures.

Because the SUV right is not obviously attached to the traditional right - not religious conservative, even uncomfortable with strong religious belief, somewhat social conservative but also individualistic rather than "family values" - they haven't overwhelmingly come on side with it before. But the situation of threat and war changed that. The SUV right is first and foremost a bunch of xenophobes with a very competitive approach to the world. They're absolute suckers for an us-vs-them struggle. They're the seemingly ordinary suburbanites who, overnight, developed deep-seated anti- French prejudice the moment France threatened to vote against the Iraq war in the UN. They find it very easy for international relations to be portrayed as an us-vs-them struggle, and the threat of outside terrorism kicked their general distrust of outsiders into high gear. They voted for Bush, not because his policies are *effective* in fighting terrorism, but because his *rhetoric*, his simplistic us-vs-them good and evil view of the world, makes him "one of the guys" to an increasing number of people who feel the same. When it comes to the issue of US policy pissing off the rest of the world, they simply don't care, and are ready to believe that it's all just resentment of US power. I called them the SUV right because it's the same attitude in world affairs that you see from many Americans on the road - they drive a giant aggressive-looking vehicle that makes them feel strong and isolated from external danger, and are contemptuous and dismissive of any complaints that they're screwing the environment and putting other drivers at risk in the process. That's what pussies say.

They won this election because, quite simply, their numbers have been growing for over a decade and now there are more of them than us, where "us" is the group of people who, regardless of normal political affiliation, pay most of their attention to the real-world effects of policies. The "reality-based community" who might have supported the Iraq war in the beginning but not after it became totally sour, who may be economic conservatives but got off the Bush bandwagon when he created a record deficit, and so on.

In the US you haven't heard the scary details of this demographic change. In Canada a couple years ago it was detailed in a bestselling book "Fire and Ice: Canada, the United States, and the Myth of Converging Values". In the process of comparing Canada and the US, the book gives some great insight into what has been going on in the US in terms of changes in worldview and social values, *before* September 11 even happened and brought war into the equation. The interesting stuff in that book is the US coverage. Canada's social trend is pretty simple - gradually more and more liberal over time. It is the US where the rise of the "SUV right" comes out of left field during the 1990s.

I read that a while ago, noting that it meant the US electorate becomes inherently more supportive of xenophobic, competitive, and aggressive policies. But I figured that the Bush administration had been *so* spectacularly incompetent that there was still no way in hell they could win the popular vote. I was wrong. The "reality based community" really isn't that big in the US. Most of the population doesn't care enough about actual policies to vote out the most incompetent president in living memory, the guy who started the new Vietnam not because everyone was worried about Communism sweeping across the globe but for no real reason at all. There are a lot of people to whom it matters first and foremost that Bush, incompetent or not, is "one of them" - and the size of the "them" is growing.

Democrats in the US are incredibly discouraged right now. The anti-Bush movement was the biggest, strongest boost to liberalism in the US since the 60s. A real movement, organized, funded, was created from very little. It got out the vote. And Bush still got more votes this time than he did against Al Gore in the election with no issues. A lot of people are going nuts about the election fraud but it doesn't really matter. I'm sure there was fraud left right and center that will take ages to sort out, and there is some chance Kerry might have "really" won Ohio and thus the election according to the odd US electoral college rules. But Bush won the popular vote by a margin of several million, and it's tremendously unlikely that margin was caused by cheating.

This is extremely discouraging. Basically what it means is that American society and culture have moved to the point where an aggressive, warmongering, socially conservative President can win elections *because* he is an aggressive, warmongering, socially conservative President, even if his actual policies are spectacular failures even as warmongering goes. The only road to positive change is the hard road - trying to change the values of enough Americans back to values that care about cooperation, fairness, community, and the real effects of policies.

Addition:

I wrote this in about an hour after waking up this morning, so it wasn't as coherent as I would have liked. Anyway, I just thought of the IDEAL example of what's going on, that I forgot.

South Park.

The creators of South Park are bigtime SUV right. Much more individualistic than traditional social conservatives, even vaguely libertarian. In tbe Clinton years people could even have mistaken them for being liberal, since they seemed pretty nonconformist. But after Bush got in power they got more openly political, and you see a classic example of the SUV right...

They're not religious conservatives - they even make fun of them frequently - but their most hostile portrayal was actually against atheists and secularism, and they're pretty clearly anti-abortion.

They don't seem stereotypically social conservative - not homophobic, for example - but it's eventually noticable that their hostile brand of humor is really often directed at liberals, and far more seldom at "mainstream" conservatives. They're anti-abortion, they're self-professed Republicans, they bitch about political correctness a HUGE amount but about actual racism and discrimination almost never, etc. If you got your impression about US society from South Park you'd think that racism didn't exist any more or had even been reversed, and the only problem was people being overzealous in trying to fight racism (this is a bog-standard SUV right view).

And as far as foreign affairs go, they've made themselves poster children for the attitude that no matter how badly the US fucks up abroad, it's absolutely vital to go around "kicking ass" and being an aggressive winner, and to hell with any whining pussies who are against that.