 | | | | by Brendan O'Neill |
spiked is kickstarting a major debate on the aftermath of the US election - exploring its impact in America and internationally, on everything from war and peace to science and environmentalism. This page will be updated with new contributions over the coming week - have your say by emailing Brendan O'Neill at Brendan.ONeill@spiked-online.com
| Read the responses to the spiked debate:
- Frank Furedi
This was an election where you had to have your wits about you. Almost every 'insight' gained through the media's presentation of reality proved to be wrong. The most disturbing feature of the election campaign was the way that the only issue appeared to be Bush - are you for or against him? With all the fire directed at Bush, very few questions were asked about alternatives.
In previous times, a statement such as 'My name is John Kerry and I am here to report for duty' would have been of interest only to collectors of self-caricatures. But few were prepared to look critically at the empty wasteland of Western politics. Bush became the all-purpose distraction for a complacent cultural elite that subsists on a diet of Michael Moore videos and regards the wearing of a ribbon as a sign of political bravery.
My predictions: the anti-Bush jokes will get worse; gesture politics will thrive; and despite the anti-modernist stance of both sides of the Culture War, expect even more hysterical debates about trivia. Conspiracy theories, of course, will continue to flourish.
Frank Furedi's most recent book is Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting Twenty-First Century Philistinism.
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- Michael Fitzpatrick
In his bestseller Stupid White Men, Michael Moore, tribune of the American radical left, claims that George W Bush is an alcoholic and advises him: 'Get help. Join AA. Take your daughters to Al-Anon.' This moralistic line illustrates the fact that, on key social issues, the most conservative outlook in US politics is to be found on what is generally regarded as its left wing. (A supporter of Ralph Nader in 2000, Moore - like many left-wingers and greens - refused to support his campaign in 2004, on the tactical grounds that it divided the anti-Bush vote.)
Right-wing Republicans are vehemently denounced by radicals for their links with Bible-belt fundamentalists. But the old-time religion of Bush and his supporters is less insidious than the modern religiosity of Alcoholics Anonymous, which Moore commends to the president (though, of course, AA is rooted in evangelical Christianity). The first two steps of AA's notorious 12-step programme are the victim's acceptance of powerlessness in the face of alcohol and his or her surrender to a supreme power - formerly the Deity, latterly the counsellor as proxy for the therapeutic state.
The Republican right is engaged in a continual struggle against the Enlightenment principles enshrined in the constitution and bill of rights, on issues such as the separation of church and state, free speech and civil liberties. Yet, whereas the right is instinctively inclined to coerce others - at home and abroad - the distinctive feature of the left is its drive to internalise coercion, through bans on hate speech and thought crimes, curbs on advertising so-called junk food, smoking in public and other healthy living initiatives. The feebleness and incoherence of John Kerry's critique of Bush's 'war on terror' suggests that a Democratic president would be no less militaristic and repressive in the pursuit of US foreign policy goals.
The death of Christopher Reeve during the campaign provided Democrats with a convenient focus for their attempt to brand the Republicans as anti-science for their equivocal record on stem-cell research. But, whereas the US right has pursued a highly pragmatic approach on this issue, balancing establishment interests in science and populist gestures to the anti-abortion lobby, a comprehensive, ideologically committed hostility towards scientific advance (around issues such as GM food) is to be found among the environmental activists around the Nader/Moore wing of US politics. Radical scaremongering about the dangers of global warming, pollution and epidemic disease suggest that the left has an even more bleak and fatalistic world view than that of the Bible-bashers with their message of 'repent, the end is nigh'.
Bush's victory is a defeat, not only for Kerry, but also for Nader and the remnants of the American left. This is to be welcomed because it marks a setback for the backward-looking and small-minded, illiberal and anti-democratic outlook that has come to define the radical rump. Nader may be anti-corporate, but only because he favours a petit-bourgeois fantasy of small-scale production protected by state regulation. The result was a forceful snub to the degenerate populism of Michael Moore, whose self-loathing is exceeded only by his contempt for the millions of American citizens who voted for Bush in the absence of any real alternative. Perhaps the message of the American electorate is that they would rather have a drinker in the White House than suffer a sanctimonious prig like Moore telling either them or their president how to conduct their personal lives.
Michael Fitzpatrick's latest book is MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know.
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- Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
In the 1972 presidential election, Nixon trounced the anti-war McGovern so badly that McGovern took only one state. When the Watergate scandal ensued, eventually implicating Nixon himself, a bumper sticker read: 'Don't blame me. I'm from Massachusetts.'
Massachusetts - the Massachusetts that lost so many lives in the 9/11 attacks - took such a beating from Bush in this year's pre-election debates (Bush-style debating being nearly all ad hominem) that one must conclude a major consequence of Bush's re-election will be a continuation of the politics of division. Dissent and disagreement, no. The administration has radically challenged customary civil liberties and threatened freedom of expression. The politics of division, yes.
A remarkably large number of Americans voted for Kerry, delivering a clarion call for change. Voters questioned an administration that has once again mired us in an unpopular and possibly unwinnable war, sanctioned job outsourcing through its support of multinational corporations, delivered unprecedented tax cuts to the wealthy, departed radically from our traditions of multilateral diplomacy and wartime cooperation, rolled back hard-won laws and policies in realms such as the environment and nuclear proliferation, and placed our basic civil liberties in peril. Bush's reelection brings, at the very least, disappointment for roughly half of the polity. Every indication is that they will transform that disappointment into new energy for reform.
But any new reform thrust needs broader horizons than what was possible in campaign rhetoric. On the issues of war in Iraq, healthcare and jobs, the Kerry-Edwards ticket displayed greater humanity and gravitas, while the Bush-Cheney campaign hid the complexities of these issues beneath a veil of simplistic moralism. Many voters seem to have voted for Bush on the moral issues of abortion and stem-cell research, issues which Kerry in turn simplified. Bush's 'culture of life' argument is important and compelling, so much so that Americans would be much better off indeed if his policies did not so often seem to run counter to such a notion. It is precisely this call for humanity, after all, that drove so many Kerry supporters to question the Iraq war.
A Kerry win would not have solved the agonising problems we face, but at the very least it would have registered many Americans' alarm about the current path we are on regarding so many different realms. One of the best things to come out of this election - if indeed it does - is that it is now apparent to more people that Bush and the far-right hardly have the monopoly on morality they claim to have. The Kerry-Edwards campaign began a long overdue process of reclaiming moral ground for democrats, without which their vision has faltered in recent years. A reinvigorated and reengaged Democratic Party is vital for our polity.
Discussions of the current polarisation in the nation nearly always blame partisanship. At its best, however, the nation cannot just withstand sharp left-right disagreement, as it showed in this campaign, but also benefit from them. No one political party or group can escape the confines of its worldview to give us the answers we need to vexing public issues or the larger vision we achieve at our best as citizens. Unity comes not from coerced uniformity or pressured consent, nor will it somehow spring naturally forth from repeated whines about partisanship. It is based, in a free and open society, on open dissent, lively engagement, and civil attempts to persuade. What we seem to lack the most in these trying times is that rare sensibility that combines openness to new evidence and persuasion with gentle firmness on matters of shared principle. In the social and cultural upheavals of the twentieth century, we have somewhere lost sight of our public philosophy - or perhaps we never did have it clearly enough in focus.
The effect of the current election could well be further division in the country. If we are not careful, we will need a new bumper on our vehicles, one that wraps around the whole body of the car. This may soon be necessary both to protect us from ourselves and to accommodate a new bumper sticker: 'Don't blame me. I'm from Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, or the District of Columbia.'
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn is associate professor of history at Syracuse University and author of Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.
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- Paul Campos
Some observations....
One thing that is being overlooked in all the typical post-game over-interpretation of what was in many ways a largely random outcome: If the unemployment rate in Ohio had been two points worse, and/or if John Kerry possessed more charisma than the average toaster oven, Kerry would have been elected despite losing the popular vote by three and half million ballots. A margin of 65,000 Ohio votes, when compared to the 120,000,000 that were cast in the election as a whole, is essentially nothing - and that's all you would have to flip to change the outcome. And the problems with America's antiquated electoral college system are just going to get worse, as campaigns become more sophisticated about figuring out how to capture the marginal votes that make all the difference in such a system.
The gay rights issue is a gold mine for politicians like Bush, and will become even more of one if America's federal courts start 'discovering' same-sex constitutional rights, as they did in regard to abortion. Republican politicians can posture endlessly about abortion, because they know nothing they do will actually lead to any serious curtailment of abortion rights, so they never have to pay the political price for their (purely theoretical) opposition. A similar dynamic is likely to play out in the context of gay rights.
John Edwards has a better chance of being the next Democratic nominee than Hillary Clinton. Edwards is basically Bush in Democratic drag, and it's become obvious that at present the ideal presidential candidate is a moderate, telegenic Southerner. Or, in Bush's case, a pseudo-moderate, telegenic pseudo-Southerner. As for Hillary, I find it hard to believe that the Democrats will nominate another Ivy League liberal any time soon.
Paul Campos is professor of law at the University of Colorado and author of The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession With Weight is Hazardous to Your Health.
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- John Brignell
An interesting election for number watchers! First and foremost, the pollsters emerge with egg on their faces, yet again. Not only was the result not the knife-edge that had the lawyers drooling over dreams of even fatter fees, the exit polls were allocating victory to the wrong candidate. When will they (or, more importantly, their customers) learn? People do not necessarily tell the truth to surveyors, and a distinguishable subset, such as early voters, are not representative of the whole population.
Pathetic attempts at intervention by some Brits also foundered. The Lancet (how are the mighty fallen) weighed in with a typical bit of extreme epidemiology. From a non-result (RR = 1.5, 95% CI 1.1-2.3) they performed a direct extrapolation to produce a virtual body count of 100,000 in Iraq - totally unjustifiable, but they did not have to undergo an election to prove them wrong. The Guardianistas launched a direct appeal to individual electors in Clark County. Only they could have the arrogant gall to think that such action could produce anything but a determination to do exactly the opposite.
Another group that foundered were the omen watchers. The Times (London) reminded us of a few of the old favourites: 'Since 1936, the result of the Washington Redskins' last home game before a presidential election had been a guide to the result. If the Redskins won, so, too, did the president; if they lost, the president lost as well. Last week, the Redskins lost 28-14 to the Green Bay Packers.... Before yesterday no president who won his first election with a minority of the popular vote had ever been re-elected. No incumbent had won a second term when the Dow Jones fell by more than 0.5 per cent in the previous October. A president whose father also held the post had never won a second term.'
As to the future, a victory for conservative Christianity over liberal eco-theology should lead to interesting times. Now that Vladimir Putin has cynically signed up to the Kyoto economic suicide pact, in the full knowledge that it is scientifically unsupportable and as a result of crude horse-trading with the EU, the US economy will be granted a considerable advantage over its rivals. Mind you, it will need every bit of it in the light of the debt and deficit policies of the recent past.
John Brignell edits the NumberWatch website and is author of The Epidemiologists: Have They Got Scares For You.
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- Phil Mullan
A frequent comment during the election campaign was that neither candidate had much to say about economic policy beyond their common pledge to halve the government's huge budget deficit. So does it matter for US economic prospects now that Bush has been returned rather than being replaced by Kerry? The short answer is no - but that doesn't mean that after the uncertainties of the campaign we are now back to 'business as normal'.
There is very little 'normal' about the US economy at the moment, in the sense of it tracking a traditional business cycle. Following the 2001 slowdown the economy has failed to exhibit the normal recovery bounce. In just about every sector the weakness of economic dynamic is marked. It is only with the benefit of enormously supportive economic policies, both fiscal (those big budget deficits) and monetary (low interest rates) that the economy has shown any forward momentum.
Hence the slowness of job expansion over the past three years, which Kerry highlighted in challenging the president's credentials for providing economic security. But the White House will be able to do little to invigorate this sluggish pace of job creation; both candidates' near silence on economic issues was at least partly a recognition of this. For example, with the economy in this state everyone knows that making any speedy moves to cut the budget deficit could only make things worse, but trying to provide more public spending stimulus would draw the charge of even greater 'fiscal irresponsibility'.
One thing holding the economy back, discouraging recruitment and investment, has been the pervasive sense of uncertainty within business. This fear factor is a symptom of a broader sense of social anxiety and vulnerability, which the election campaign has only served to reinforce. On top of this, some specific business and economic issues of recent times have compounded the levels of business FUD - 'fear, uncertainty and doubt' - and the White House is unlikely to do anything to dissipate these either; more likely the opposite.
The bursting of the stock market bubble in 2000 rapidly dispelled illusions many had had in a late 1990s New Economy renaissance. This deflation of business expectations was exacerbated by the subsequent economic slowdown precipitated by the post-bubble fallout. But matters became much worse with the overblown reaction to business scandals at Enron, WorldCom and a few other companies in late 2001 and 2002. Corporate America became public enemy no1. Public prosecutors, financial regulators and lawmakers jumped on the anti-business bandwagon, leading to the passing of the world's most prescriptive piece of corporate governance legislation ever, the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
But as important as the dampening impact of such external intrusion is the way that many businesses have themselves adopted a range of mechanisms detrimental to investment and expansion - voluntary codes of conduct, extensive risk management systems and comprehensive internal control regimes. Whether expressing business defensiveness or reinforcing it, this ongoing trajectory towards a more regulated and formalised economy shows no signs of abating.
One uncertainty - who occupies the White House - may be out of the way, but many more remain to sustain business caution, from fears about oil prices, a dollar collapse and how to handle relations with China. The assessment of each of these threats is exaggerated, but even more significant is the way that taken together they illustrate the modern business mindset of vulnerability.
The Financial Times reported that, when asked about the impact of the presidential contest, business leaders often responded by asking: could it get any worse? For them, it can and probably will. The economy remains hampered by numerous constraints and imbalances, and on the record of the past four years even a supposed pro-business Republican administration is more likely to increase than diminish them, both through the impact of expanding state regulatory policy and in the way its wider political message encourages the fear factor in business to endure. So although the US economy is not in any serious crisis, it is unlikely to break free from its torpor.
Phil Mullan is author of The Imaginary Time Bomb: Why an Ageing Population Is Not a Problem.
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- Daniel Ben-Ami
A key thing to watch after the election will be how the administration decides to deal with America's economic problems. It may not even acknowledge that it has any problems until it is forced to do so by circumstances. Bill Clinton famously won the 1992 election with the slogan, 'It's the economy, stupid' - but even back then there was little real discussion of economic issues. This time there was virtually none.
Although the headline figures look relatively good, with the American economy forecast to grow 4.3 per cent this year and 3.5 per cent in 2005 by the IMF, there are problems beneath the surface. America's apparent dynamism is built more on the extension of credit in various forms than the strength of its domestic economy. Although credit can ease economic difficulties in the short term it can also store up trouble for the future.
Contrary to the impression given by many pundits the American authorities, rather than individuals, are the main culprit in creating the massive credit boom. Real interest rates have been negative since October 2002. In other words, people are essentially being paid to borrow money. This credit boom, created by the authorities to overcome economic lethargy, has played a central role in maintaining economic momentum in America. But the more it goes on, the more it encourages a build-up of household debt. Such an accumulation makes America more vulnerable to some kind of financial crisis in the future.
America also has a burgeoning fiscal deficit; the government is spending significantly more than it receives in revenue. A combination of tax cuts for the rich and higher spending, partly to finance the Iraq war, have opened up the gap. As a result, the state itself is building up its debt. Then there is the record current account deficit (the country is importing more than it is exporting), which has reached almost 6 per cent of GDP. To help fund this gap America essentially needs to borrow money from abroad. Asian central banks have played the largest role in financing this deficit by buying American government debt.
As a result of these factors there is a strong possibility of some kind of financial turmoil over the coming years. No doubt the US authorities will try to find someone else to blame. American consumers or Asian countries are likely targets. But in reality the Bush administration will be largely responsible.
Daniel Ben-Ami is author of Cowardly Capitalism: The Myth of the Global Financial Casino.
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- Sandy Starr
One of the most striking things about this election has been the liberal and international reaction to Bush's victory. There was a palpable contempt for Republican voters in much of the commentary leading up to the election that went beyond political disagreements - the implication being that anyone gullible enough to vote Bush must be a hopelessly stupid Neanderthal like him.
This sentiment has grown stronger since the result was announced, with despondency turning into resentment against the US electorate for choosing the wrong man. Perhaps the UK Daily Mirror sums the mood up best, with its 4 November frontpage headline 'How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?'. The Guardian's pull-out supplement on the same day sported a black cover with just the words 'Oh, God' in the middle. The website distopia.com has announced that the Republican victory 'signifies the death of common sense', and is holding a wake, with a range of black armbands for people to wear - one of which sports the slogan 'STUPID PEOPLE CHOOSE STUPID LEADERS'.
Since Bush won the popular vote this time around, there has been little to mitigate his opponents' naked hostility toward the electorate. There were a few half-hearted attempts to point the finger at vote rigging and other such shenanigans, with allegations of voter intimidation and Michael Moore making a point of stationing hundreds of people with video cameras outside polling stations, to deter those who would 'suppress the vote'. But this conspiracy mongering didn't stick - there were no hanging chads to hang the blame on this time.
Moore and his camera operators, scrutinising the election proceedings rather than seeking to sway voters, seem to represent the liberal attitude to the election as a whole. There was a petulant assumption by Bush's opponents that it was incumbent upon voters to get him out of power, rather than it being incumbent upon Bush's opponents to make a persuasive case for getting him out. Ironically, this petulant attitude on the part of the Democrats may well have antagonised voters, and thus helped the Republicans to win. This situation speaks ill of both the Democrats and the Republicans. An election in which people are motivated to vote primarily in order to cock a snook at one another is an election in which political substance is sorely missing.
Sandy Starr works atspiked.
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- Norman Levitt
A glance at the electoral map tells the essential story. America is a deeply fissured society. The post-Second World War 'Era of Good Feeling', with its universal consensus that one was singularly lucky to be living in the USA, has disintegrated. Two cultures glare balefully at each other with an antagonism that goes far beyond party politics. Ironically, the events of 9/11 and their sequel have catalysed, rather than retarded, the hardening of mutual distrust into mutual detestation.
The two factions might usefully be called 'Nativist' and 'Cosmopolitan'. The former - Bush country on your map - is fiercely nostalgic for a perhaps imaginary nineteenth-century ethos. It is undereducated, superstitious, saturated with religious zeal, puritanical, chauvinist, xenophobic, and easily seduced by platitudes into supporting the very politicians who, in reality, bleed its people white. The latter - Kerry country - is reasonably well-read, articulate, analytical, sceptical of religion and other blind enthusiasms, tolerant of cultural difference and individual eccentricity, and sensitive to the fact that there is a real world beyond America's borders.
The apparent re-election of the half-wit favorite son of the Nativists obviously deepens the gloom of the Cosmopolitans (but even a Kerry victory wouldn't have effaced it). An unprecedented number of Americans now daydream, at least, about the possibility of living somewhere else, somewhere where Yahoos don't abound. The scientific community is especially alienated.
America's vaunted prosperity is now threatened by decay - not mere numinous psychological malaise, but concrete, physical degradation of infrastructure, concomitant with the paralysis of American society's ability to renew and innovate on an appropriate scale. Europe, all in all, is a much more hopeful place. One wonders, then, whether a reverse brain-drain might eventually develop, with American scientists and intellectuals migrating, in serious numbers, eastward across the Atlantic, leaving the Nativist barbarians to deal with the growing mess.
Norman Levitt is professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and author of Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture.
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- Andrew Calcutt
The likelihood that George W Bush has won a second term of office is prompting fears that the USA is in the grip of neo-conservative fundamentalism - a right-wing, political revival. This is yet another expression of the politics of fear, with neo-cons substituted for terrorists in this particular version, and near-hysteria common to both.
Moreover, the only fundamental thing about this interpretation of events is the elementary character of the mistake inherent in it. Voting for Bush must not be confused with strong allegiance to right-wing political policies, ideas and values. Bush is primarily a performer, and the stylised performance he gives is clearly recognisable (unlike John Kerry's): it is more widely known as Country & Western. Bush commands support insofar as he does C&W, and in that this indicates how popular culture now drives politics it also represents the exhaustion of politics, not its revival.
What scares some people about Bush is that in his lyrics, sorry, speeches, he is less than welcoming to some social groups. To the extent that it involves a degree of separation, Bush on stage is different from Tony Blair, for whom inclusion is everything. But the one thing that's common to both these acts - something which is historically exceptional but all too unremarkable today - is the relegation of the electorate to the position of a passive audience. Voting today is hardly more political than Pop Idol (or American Idol, in the USA); neither is the contingent (not fundamental) support for Bush.
Andrew Calcutt lectures at the University of East London and is author of Brit Cult: An A to Z of British Pop Culture.
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- James Woudhuysen
Bill Gates will be delighted. But on both coasts of the land of IT, hip specialists in software and design, pursuing the Clinton-era Holy Grails of usability, user-friendliness and user delight, will be devastated. For them, Howard Dean's abortive election campaign was a template. The web could be a force for self-organisation among Democrats - bottom-up, intrinsically democratic and empowering, and biological in its power. Michael Moore showed the power of the media - quick DVDs of Fahrenheit 9/11 included.
What a blow. It is 37 years since the Canadian professor Marshal McLuhan declared the importance of the medium, not the message (in The Medium is the Massage). Yet the American left still prefers form over content. It still thinks that politics is a matter of channels - the web, 'smart mobs' assembled through mobile phones. It still thinks rock music is a key to turning people on politically.
It is also exactly 40 years since the venerable Frankfurt School Marxist Herbert Marcuse declared that a consumerist American elite had turned the average American into a One-Dimensional Man. Yet still the American left likes the wide-screen, but one-dimensional anti-Bush politics of Michael Moore.
A much more substantial criticism of Bush was made not by a middle-aged ex-hippie, but by Andy Grove, the head of chipmaker Intel. Grove was caustic about Bush's inability to organise supplies of flu vaccine (partly owing to failures at a British supplier). Interviewed by USA Today, he said: 'This government can't even prevent an ordinary failure of the business market from causing probably more American deaths than terrorism. It is a manifestation of a government that has no appreciation of science and technology.'
Bush's hostility to stem cell research was one point of difference between him and Kerry. But we did not hear so much about Bush letting America fall behind in the take-up of broadband. Under Bush, the Federal Communications Commission has been as much a bureaucratic impediment to better telecommunications as it ever has been.
James Woudhuysen is professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University and co-author of Why Is Construction So Backward?
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- Stuart Derbyshire
Bush's opposition to the Kyoto protocol and his defence of GM farming techniques does mean that there is space to argue the merits of scientific evidence pertaining to transgenic crops, global warming and other environmental issues that would have likely been rejected by a Kerry administration. But there is much to lament in Bush's victory - it is bad news for stem cell research in the USA. On 9 August 2001, Bush restricted work on stem cells to existing lines, 'where the life and death decision has already been made', but made any research to create new embryo stem cell lines ineligible for federal funding.
Initially this policy received a lukewarm response from the American scientific community but as it has become increasingly clear that the existing lines are more minimal and far less useful than originally hoped, support has begun to evaporate. Kerry would have reversed the policy banning federal funds to create new stem cell lines.
Bush's policy on stem cells is an example of a broader politicisation of scientific and medical issues that has accelerated under Bush. Under his administration, decisions made by independent National Institutes of Health to fund peer-reviewed grants into homosexuality have been reversed and doctors who provide abortions have been attacked, in particular those that carry out procedures such as intact dilatation and extraction, also referred to as 'partial-birth abortion'. Kerry would not have pursued these policies.
The hysteria created towards homeland-security and the protection of American borders has also had negative and distorting effects on American science. Large sums of money have been needlessly shifted away from established areas of research and towards increasingly paranoid preparations for unlikely biological attacks. Increasing numbers of foreign scientists have faced escalating hurdles to entering American research institutes and universities such that most have been delayed and many have decided not to come. The shift of domestic scientists abroad to perform research increasingly forbidden in America, and the barriers to foreign scientists entering America, means that Bush's religious and paranoid outlook threatens both a 'brain drain' and a 'brain strain'.
Stuart Derbyshire is assistant professor of anesthesiology and radiology at the University of Pittsburgh.
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- Barry Schwartz
It's the morning after - and though the results are not official, the USA, and the world, has just been visited with disaster. Bush is the worst president in at least the last 75 years. His foreign policy is arrogant and endangers the world. His domestic policy is unjust, inhumane, fiscally irresponsible, and amazingly uninformed. The world will suffer from this result.
What it reveals is a divide in American society that is surely deeper than at any time in our history since the Civil War. For what seems to have determined the outcome of the election is not Iraq and not the economy, but 'moral values'. The USA has become a nation of Christian fundamentalists - people who 'know in their hearts' that they're right. Fundamentalists as a group, and their president, are profoundly anti-intellectual. They are disdainful of evidence and of expertise (Bush has systematically fired everyone in the executive branch who actually had a claim to knowing something if they dared to express doubt or disagreement with his administration's policies. These people have been replaced with people who have no training or expertise but share Bush's certainty.) The USA has always been suspicious of 'expertise', but never before has expertise been so thoroughly rooted out of government.
The changes in governmental institutions and programmes (most especially the Supreme Court), and the bankrupting of the government that comes in the wake of Bush's policies, will leave a legacy from which it may take generations to recover. I'm a generally optimistic person, but I fear that the USA has just led the world into a very dark tunnel that seems to go on forever.
Barry Schwartz is author of The Paradox of Choice.
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- James Harkin
Those of us of a sunny disposition live in hope that Bush's gift of a second term leads the progressive camp to question why they lost. The political left are fond of poo-poohing personality politics, but they fought this election using a tiresome caricature of Bush's personality - a strategy which backfired miserably because their man was found to be even more wooden than the president.
There were some real differences between George Bush and John Kerry. Kerry was robust in his defence of stem-cell research, and relatively strong in his defence of a woman's right to choose abortion. But these hardly amount to a manifesto, and the differences between the two will in any case have been watered down in political deal-making between the different branches of American government.
Those differences, however, look trifling when set against Kerry's derisory response to the 'war on terror'. While Bush promised us a war on evil, Kerry was promising to deliver us from the axis of shadowy neo-conservative evil surrounding Bush.
What neither of the candidates had the guts to mention is that America is now in real trouble. What should have been a police action - the rounding up of the few terrorists behind 9/11 - has become a colossal tragedy of an elephant chasing its own tail. Three years after 9/11, America finds itself locked in to 'nation-building' missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which it does not fully understand. Meanwhile, it is still being humbled by Osama bin Laden - still at large, and, wielding only a handi-cam, happily dictating the terms of the election in one of the largest democracies on Earth. America is on the verge of losing its greatness, and nothing President Bush or Senator Kerry said in the course of the campaign did anything to address that danger.
Kerry has four years to give up his schoolboy salutes, hang up his borrowed hunting rifle and concentrate on the issues.
James Harkin is director of talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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- Helen Searls
On the Democrats
In 2000 the Democrats lost the election and felt cheated. In 2004 the Democrats lost again but this time they feel defeated. On occasions defeats have had a cathartic effect on losers. Last time the Democrats were in the political wilderness in the Reagan/Bush senior years, the party underwent a major rethink. President Clinton's subsequent success centred on abandoning old shibboleths and pursuing a more centrist agenda.
But this time around, if first reactions are anything to go by, Democrats are not ready for a period of self-criticism. In fact right on cue, when exit polls indicated that perhaps 'moral values' were important in finally determining who voters voted for, Bush-haters immediately had someone other than themselves to blame: Bible-thumping conservatives were suddenly the daunting powerhouse behind Bush's re-election.
In the next few weeks Democrats will step up their anxiety and fervour about the religious right, but in reality this is a bogeyman of their own creation. True, the USA is religious. I admit I am still taken aback by the way that sports superstars like Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling begin post-game interviews by thanking God for success on the field. But while public expressions of faith are commonplace, the religious right are not driving politics in the way that defeated Democrats imagine.
Only one-in-five voters cited moral values as the most important issue in this election - only marginally more than the numbers that cited the war in Iraq as important, or the economy. Many Republicans may have justified their votes in this way because there was little else positive that they could say in their support of the Bush presidency. Bush did, after all, spend much of his campaign ads telling voters that he shared their values. So it is of little surprise that some voters repeated this phrase as they left the polls.
Looking back at the election, you can see that moral values were far from a clear issue in the campaign. Republicans had great difficulty in presenting a consistent package of moral values to voters. In some areas the party did attempt to mobilise Christian conservatives, but in the swing states Republicans sent other, quite different moral messages to voters. One of the major campaigners for Bush in the final weeks was California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger - a pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-gun control and pro-stem cell research Republican.
Even the hot button issues of abortion and gay marriage were far from clear-cut. They were barely discussed in the election campaign - and while such issues have come to signify some of the cultural or ethical differences between core Republicans and Democrats, among less partisan voters their impact are less obvious. In the final days of the campaign, Bush recognised this when he admitted that he was prepared to look at some form of civil unions for gays even while opposing gay marriage.
The 2004 election has raised the spectre of the religious right and evangelical rednecks in the imagination of Democrats. With these bogeymen in play, the contempt that Democrats feel towards irrational Republican voters is likely to intensify.
On abortion
One of the so-called 'hot button' issues in the US election was abortion. The pro-choice lobby spent millions publicising dire warnings about the future of reproductive rights in the USA if Bush was re-elected. However, the president does not support his own party's platform on abortion. While he has been hailed by some in the anti-abortion lobby as the most 'pro-life' president ever, he can't bring himself to support his party's calls for a constitutional amendment to outlaw all abortions.
In his address to the annual anti-abortion rally in January, Bush admitted that America is not ready to ban abortion. That's not to say that there will not be further restrictions. In 2003, NARAL Pro-Choice America recorded 558 legislative attacks on reproductive rights at the state level; 45 passed along with the first-ever federal ban on abortion, the so-called 'partial-birth abortion' ban, which is now tied up in the Supreme Court, where it should be declared unconstitutional. These drip-drip attacks on the provision of services are likely to continue, with little done at a federal level to outlaw the procedure itself.
On the judicial level, there may be some movement. The make-up of the Supreme Court will change, with as many as four members likely to resign in the next few years (Justice Clarence Thomas is the only member under the age of 65). Chief Justice William Rehnquist may be the first, the 80-year-old currently battling what appears to be a particularly malignant form of thyroid cancer. The current makeup of the court supports Roe v Wade, the law that makes abortion legal in the USA, by six votes to three, so two resignations of those in that majority who will, no doubt, be replaced by very conservative justices, would change that. After that happens, a case would have to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court which takes several years at the best of times.
If the court voted to overturn Roe v Wade it would allow individual states to decide their own abortion laws. Several states already have laws on the books in preparation for this possibility and according to a new study published by the Center for Reproductive Rights, 'What If Roe Fell?', 20 states would be likely to ensure that abortion services continue. In the remaining states, most would ban abortion. In many of these states abortion is already severely curtailed, with some having only one or two providers in the whole state. There is a strong argument to be made that this would actually be a positive event, as it would require the prochoice lobby to go out and win the argument about why abortion rights are a good thing. In some states they will lose, in others they may win. But if outright bans on abortion became commonplace, we might see a host of abortion clinics being set up in border towns. But that scenario is several years down the road.
Helen Searls lives and works in Washington, DC.
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- James Heartfield
After the Spanish election defeat for José Maria Aznar in March, and British prime minister Tony Blair's self-doubts in June, it seemed as if the 'coalition of the willing' that US President George W Bush gathered to invade Iraq was heading for a meltdown. Then last month Australian prime minister John Howard beat off a challenge from the anti-war candidate Mark Latham. Now, at the time of writing, it seems that Bush has weathered the storm of criticism over the war to win a second term.
In 2000, Europe's liberal intelligentsia mocked the gridlocked US electoral machine, calling Bush's mandate into doubt. Ironically, it was US disengagement from the world that they feared then. But they were more disturbed by the US attempt to organise the 'international community' around an invasion of Iraq. West European leaders are feeling anxious about the fallout from their ostentatious breach with America, and, apart from Blair and Silvio Berlusconi, they would no doubt have felt happier to see John Kerry in the White House.
In 2004, Bush has faced down the questions over his mandate. Jokes about Jeb Bush rigging the voting machines in Florida would ring hollow today. Nobody can claim that the question of the war was not put to the US electorate. The anti-war Democrat Howard Dean was knocked out of the contest early; the anti-war independent Ralph Nader was reduced to insignificance; the candidate who favoured greater cooperation with European allies, John Kerry, has lost. Anti-war feeling in the US has been important, but the radicals' willingness to join Kerry, 'reporting for duty', just showed they had no confidence in their ability to win over the American people.
The political process in America has looked a lot healthier over the past month than its European counterpart - with more voters on the register, a bigger turnout, and queues to the ballot box stretching down the road. In Europe, meanwhile, a usually toothless parliament rejected the European Commission over the Italian Justice commissioner Rocco Buttiglione's anti-gay views. One debate was conducted in the open, the other was 'corridor politics', mysterious to most Europeans, who have little sense of ownership of their continent's political direction. Indeed, the territorial expansion of the European Union eastwards might be a lot more peaceful than America's invasion of Iraq, but it was also characteristic of the democratic deficit: it was simply not discussed at a popular level in Western Europe until it was a fait accompli. In the East, meanwhile, sullen deputies were forced to vote in years of accumulated European Law ('the Acquis') without any meaningful democratic scrutiny.
If this is electoral victory for Bush, it might silence his critics for now - but the election consolidated the view among all but the most ideological that the intervention in Iraq has been a failure. Bush's vote is not an endorsement of the conduct of the war, only a reluctant acceptance that displaying weakness would further encourage America's enemies. A spat between the hawkish foreign policy specialist Charles Krauthammer and the establishment intellectual Francis Fukuyama turned ugly when Fukuyama wondered out loud whether Krauthammer was capable of admitting the obvious: the Iraq venture has been a failure. Fukuyama's cooler judgement is the one that even the president's elite supporters are making. On this vote, Bush could consolidate, but he could not push forwards.
James Heartfield is a journalist and author of The 'Death of the Subject' Explained.
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- George Blecher
Nobody thought it would turn out this way - not Democrats, not Republicans, not even the most optimistic of right-wing strategists. It feels like the bloody aftermath of a civil war.
Obviously, a lot of the credit has to go to Bush's chief adviser, Karl Rove. But I suspect that not even Rove was quite aware of how powerful the evangelical right was, and what an important role 'moral values' would play in the election. Though they constitute a kind of pop, buzzword morality, issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and stem cell research took precedence in the minds of millions of voters over boring issues like jobs, taxes, health care, and even terrorism and the conduct of the Iraq war. A majority of the electorate proved to be willing to give the government free rein to do pretty much anything, so long as it pays lip service to their social and cultural concerns.
A complacent populace, and a strong majority of Republicans in both Houses, will allow Bush to pursue his policies with abandon. Here's a very partial list of what his administration will try to do domestically (based on what it's already done): relax environmental regulations, blur distinctions between church and state, nurture an atmosphere more congenial to corporate interests, make tax-cuts permanent, relax bank requirements to fund small and minority businesses, whittle away at abortion rights, privatise Social Security - to say nothing of appointing federal and Supreme Court Justices with a conservative agenda. No president in recent history has had so much power, nor so much interest in using it. And let's not even speculate about he'll do in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.
Initially, Bush was elected as 'a uniter, not a divider'. After convincing Congressional Democrats to sign on to his 'No Child Left Behind' education bill by promising to come up with money to fund the programme, he reneged on his promise, and since then hasn't shown any interest in conciliation or listening to others' opinions. But just as the right was mobilised before the election, it's possible that the election itself has started to mobilise a moribund Left. Since the election, in several places around the country, there have been spontaneous protests against the war, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear of more organised grassroots efforts in the months to come. What we may find is that the country is not only polarised, but that the sides are ready to confront each other in ways that we haven't seen since the Vietnam era.
George Blecher is a writer based in New York.
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- Joe Kaplinsky
The American President will not back the Kyoto Protocol - but concern with climate change will continue to reshape the US economy. Initiatives at the state level will continue to accumulate. Led by New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, eight states are suing the five largest US producers of carbon dioxide to reduce emissions under 'public nuisance' laws. There are many other moves at the state level, such as California's strict emission standards for motor vehicles.
The private sector will also produce pressure for change. Shareholder activists such as the Carbon Disclosure Project are becoming increasingly influential with institutional investors. Like insurance companies, who are also pushing for action, they are demanding that companies report their emissions in the name of 'transparency'. The result is the creation of bureaucracy to manage carbon dioxide. Rhetorical critics of old-fashioned state regulation in the White House will find themselves endorsing and encouraging the new self-regulation.
A globalising economy will push in the same direction. With the Kyoto Protocol in force internationally, the USA will feel some of its force through foreign trade with the EU and Japan. China, too, announced in September 2004 that its National Bureau of Statistics would begin calculating an environmentally conscious 'green GDP'. Even so, as the largest, most productive economy in the world, America will inevitably continue to produce more carbon dioxide than any other country. And the world will continue to think that's a bad thing.
Joe Kaplinsky is a patent and technology analyst and science writer.
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- Matt Ridley
The Bush family have between them extinguished all reasons for libertarians to vote for right-wing candidates. In the 1980s, if you voted for Reagan you got real libertarian reforms that benefited ordinary people's ability to improve their own lives, while he paid lip service to a conservative agenda of guns, God and gay-bashing to get elected. In 2000, if you voted for George W Bush you got a hardline conservative social agenda, a hard line on stem cells and gay marriage, and big-government spending with big wars thrown in, while he paid lip service to libertarian ideas.
Could Britain follow suit? Tony Blair flirts with some quite libertarian ideas. Public service reform is essentially a small-government Reagan-Thatcher agenda that appeals to those Tories who believe in markets and free trade. But the future belongs to Gordon Brown and David Blunkett, who believe in big government and a conservative social agenda. So far Michael Howard is more libertarian than social conservative, but it may not last.
Matt Ridley is a science writer and author of the bestselling Genome.
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- Peter Smith
The tightening of US visa regulations will continue after the election - and would have even if Kerry had won. Both Democrats and Republicans accepted these measures as necessary in post-9/11 America, even though they seriously erode Americans' civil liberties.
Little coverage has been given to the tightening of entry conditions for travellers wishing to holiday in America or pass through US airspace. Even citizens from those countries deemed 'friendly', for whom America operates a visa waiver scheme, are now coming under closer scrutiny. Already visitors are routinely fingerprinted and digitally photographed. The US authorities have also ruled that these citizens will soon need to have biometric passports, containing data such as fingerprints and eye recognition. Having rejected the US-imposed deadline of October 2004 as unachievable, the UK government has now got until mid-2005 to sort out these biometric passports.
These changes are being driven by the US Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. They claim that they need as much information as possible on every visitor, to help ensure the safety of the American people. Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge says America is 'open to visitors but closed to terrorists'.
Travel to the 'land of the free' is now being organised around the central principle of precaution, which kicks in even before visitors have get off the aeroplane. Many travellers report that the first question they are asked by US immigration is: 'Are you a member of any terrorist organisation?' The increasing restrictions placed on travel to America are likely to have a detrimental effect in areas such as business and academia, which rely on international mobility - as well as discouraging people from spending their vacation in the USA.
One irony of these measures is that a number of US airlines are near bankruptcy, only able to operate as a result of Chapter 11 protection. With travel to and through America increasingly difficult for non-US citizens, the survival of US airlines is likely to be facilitated more by government support and handouts. All this from a supposed gas-guzzling, free-market loving administration.
Peter Smith works for a leading independent travel company.
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- Julian Baggini
The prospect of a second Bush term is deeply troubling for those who hope prosperity and democracy naturally go together with socially progressive and secular values. This result is a huge fillip for religious conservatives, whose time may now have come.
Bush is likely to appoint three Supreme Court judges over the next four years. His choices could prove historic: there haven't been any change at all to the nine justices for the past 10 years, and three Bush appointees would almost certainly give the court a solid conservative majority. That means there is a real risk that religion, of a fairly fundamentalist Christian variety, could play a much more significant role in American public life, leading to prayer in public schools and, more worryingly, anti-abortion rulings.
All this would reinforce the cultural gulf that seems to be opening up between Europe and America - or at least the half of America that has its man in power. This gulf is made most vivid by the claim that George W Bush sees himself as divinely mandated to do God's will on Earth, which seems to be much more credible than many other of the wilder, anti-Bush stories doing the rounds.
It is little comfort that, in general, when change comes it tends to be less dramatic than people fear or hope. Perhaps Bush has almost gone as far as he can in the direction of the religious right, and if he goes much further, the electorate will react by electing a moderate next time to set the country back on a more liberal course. But if the Bush legacy is a conservative Supreme Court for the foreseeable future, the damage may not be easily undone.
Julian Baggini is editor of The Philosophers' Magazine and a columnist with the Guardian.
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- Philip Hammond
In an election in which there were no discernible differences of principle between the candidates, global criticism of Bush's recklessly unilateral foreign policy and approval of Kerry's promised multilateralism seemed to highlight an important division. Yet many of the criticisms levelled at Bush - for launching a pre-emptive war on flimsy evidence, or bypassing the UN, for example - apply equally well to NATO's 1999 Kosovo bombing, still widely regarded as the epitome of successful, ethical intervention by the international community. Similarly, despite widespread complaints that Bush has refused to submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, Kosovo also established the principle that powerful nations are unaccountable to international law. As then foreign secretary Robin Cook said of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia at the time: 'This is not a court set up to bring to book Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom or Presidents of the United States.'
Everyone from Osama bin Laden to the Guardian seemed to wish they could determine the outcome of the election. As France's former foreign minister Hubert Vedrine declared in October: 'If the whole world was voting, John Kerry would be elected.' But today foreign policy is largely designed for domestic consumption. Unable to inspire enthusiasm in the narrow world of domestic politics, the international arena offers politicians greater opportunities to project an image of decisiveness and purpose. Such differences as exist are precisely differences of image and style which take account of varying national political needs. For weaker states, an inclusive international framework gives them a seat at the table. For the world's only superpower, multilateral arrangements can seem an unnecessary restriction. Where European leaders prefer a rhetoric of shared morals and values, for US politicians such values are always 'American' first and foremost.
To the Democrats, Kerry's unique selling point was that, by 'reporting for duty' with his three Purple Hearts, he could outflank the Republicans on militarism. But faced with a choice between two candidates promising to, in Kerry's words, 'drain the swamps where terrorists breed', and to 'hunt down, capture, and kill the terrorists wherever they are', voters chose the candidate who presented the most convincing image. There may not be much substance to what George Bush Senior once called 'the vision thing', but it's the image that counts.
Philip Hammond is senior lecturer in media at South Bank University.
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- David Chandler
British commentators have referred to George Bush as 'God's President', claiming that he has revived America's sense of 'Manifest Destiny'. They argue that Bush's appeal to prejudice rather than fact, and his simple stories of good and evil, help to explain his victory over the Democrats in the popular vote.
Yet another brand of evangelicism has prevailed outside the USA, where Kerry won a landslide victory according to the 'world opinion' of internet voters on the Globalvote website, which gave Kerry 77 per cent of the vote. The poll was a largely European affair with German and British voters accounting for around half the total votes. But this overwhelming opposition to Bush had little to do with political principle or differences over the war in Iraq. Rather, Europe's web-surfing middle classes are more concerned about Bush's undermining of European liberals' own sense of evangelical mission.
As columnist and high-profile supporter of the war on Iraq David Aaronovitch put it, he supported Kerry because he wants 'a new world order, a new United Nations, a state of things where we are ashamed not to help and not to intervene, and conscious that our negligence will cost us dear in the end, from Palestine to the Congo'.
Republicans are not the only ones to put faith before facts. The liberal interventionists state that they believe (or have faith) that the removal of Bush will unify the world's major powers around a reinvigorated UN and facilitate a moral interventionist agenda where ethical values can tame power rather than be subject to abuse and manipulation. Unfortunately, the Bush victory means that Europe's liberals look likely to continue to ignore the dangers of their moralising agenda - pinning the blame on the personalities and interests of the Republican administration instead - while at the same time urging interventions which are 'more ethical'.
If the opposition is confined to a debate on whose evangelicism is better, wars of 'regime change' followed by indecision and liberal 'hand-wringing' look set to be a fixture of the international agenda.
David Chandler's latest book is Constructing Global Civil Society: Morality and Power in International Relations.
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- Mischa Moselle
Bangkok, Thailand - Pa Lieu, a housekeeper to an expatriate household in Bangkok, was ecstatic when Bush's narrow squeak home became clear. Her son's job as a security guard at the US embassy here started under Bush's watch, his re-election she felt guaranteed him four more years of work. Pa Lieu is an exception to the rule.
Security has been the key issue for those watching from the Asian sidelines. To some, Bush is the man keeping a lid on Islamist insurgency, to many he's the man provoking it. Mr Ng, an acquaintance in Hong Kong, emails me to say he understood that for US voters a constant fear of Osama bin Laden would lead to a Bush vote but terrorism was not a problem for Hong Kong, even if HSBC and the US Consulate were possible targets. His reservation about Bush is 'why does he always make trouble?'.
This is a reservation shared by many in the region. If South Koreans had been able to vote, 68 per cent would have voted for John Kerry, even though he is unknown here, purely on the basis that they believed Bush would provoke a war with North Korea. It is Iraq that provokes the real unease in the region. 'Why does he keep attacking Muslims?' asks my Indonesian brother-in-law. While the 'war on terror' and Iraq policy may provoke the fear of another 9/11 in the USA, it has provoked the reality of Bali, the Marriott hotel bombings in Jakarta and Islamabad, and the Australian embassy blast in Jakarta.
Thursday's Bangkok Post splashed with an inevitable 'Bush wins second term'. Beneath the fold came 'PM: vote makes no difference.'
Mischa Moselle is a Hong Kong-based journalist currently holidaying in Thailand.Return to top
- Kevin Yuill
There were many negative aspects to this election. There was little to divide the two candidates. In an operational sense, little would have changed had Kerry won. Business as usual, we might venture, with depressing prospects in Iraq and elsewhere.
But there were some noteworthy positives. First, the oft-predicted collapse of the American democratic system, replete with lawyers issuing writs and a 2000-style paralysis finishing off what is currently the most democratic system in the world, failed to come about. The system worked. This is encouraging; in the present climate any overhauling of the constitution would doubtless curtail further the rights of Americans. Currently the most important problems with American politics lie in its content, not its form.
Second, the results repudiate the nihilistic, anti-political faction that voted for 'anyone but Bush'. The anti-Bush diatribes of those such as Michael Moore have been exposed as childish, self-indulgent rants. One need not be a fan of George W to celebrate the fact that the nattering nabobs of negativism - to borrow Spiro Agnew's wonderfully alliterative phrase - have surely lost this election.
Kevin Yuill teaches American Studies at the University of Sunderland.
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- Dominic Standish
George W Bush's seeming victory in the presidential election will give an important boost to the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Berlusconi has staked his leadership on backing Bush's 'war on terror', and drawing on the associated politics of fear appears to have paid off. Italian troops joined the US-led alliances in Afghanistan and Iraq, where Italy has become the third biggest contributor to the coalition forces after the US and the UK. Berlusconi's support for Bush in Iraq has been a high-risk strategy. With increasing Italian casualties and hostage-takings in Iraq, Berlusconi has faced mounting criticism from the government opposition coalition, large demonstrations and European partners. Italy stood behind America's campaigns as Germany, France, Spain and now Poland have wavered.
This is why Italy is often now referred to as the key European ally for the USA. And Bush and his team will continue to return the favour. 'We don't forget our friends', stated Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, during the last Bush administration, as Washington backed Italy against Germany in their recent battle for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Support for Berlusconi from a new Bush administration could be crucial in Italy's next general election, due by May 2006. Berlusconi's domestic popularity seems to be flagging with a weak economy and widespread accusations of cronyism; in seven by-elections held during October Berlusconi's coalition lost everywhere. Berlusconi's challenger will be the outgoing European Commission president, Romano Prodi. Signor Prodi has aligned himself with the dominant European powers as a critic of the US campaign in Iraq and may succeed in depicting support for the campaign as more dangerous than disengagement. As in the US presidential election, the war on terror and using the politics of fear as a resource could yet prove to be decisive in the next Italian general election.
Dominic Standish writes for numerous media organisations, including the Italian National Press Agency.
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- Vanessa Pupavac
Many in European NGO circles were hoping for a Kerry victory. But what would a Democratic win have meant for international development work? Given some of the hype around Kerry one might be forgiven for thinking that his victory would have represented a return to the heady 1960s. However, Kerry is no JK Galbraith in his international development thinking, nor are his advisers.
International development, whether Republican or Democrat, no longer means material progress. Universal prosperity as an ambition has long since been abandoned as unrealisable and destabilising. Instead international development today essentially proposes emotional adjustment and survival strategies for societies. Poverty alleviation strategies at best offer a fairer distribution of poverty, but are better understood as managing the subjectivity of the poor. As such, international development can be understood as a form of international therapeutic governance. International development projects strive to avoid raising high expectations among participants. Policies fostering self-esteem are not designed to fire ambition, but to temper frustration. So whereas earlier development thinking was preoccupied with attacking accommodation to poverty, accommodation appears to be the goal of today's therapeutic development policy.
Ironically today's conservative development agenda, wary of advancing production and raising material aspirations, has been embraced by both official circles and radical circles. However, today's conservatism is mystified by the seemingly radical reference to empowerment. Development theories compliment official development policies, and also naturalise and legitimise underdevelopment. If international development offers so little to populations globally, its continuing role is perhaps better understood as addressing the therapeutic needs of policymakers and giving them a sense of moral legitimacy.
Vanessa Pupavac teaches in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham.
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- Jen Grygiel
As an American citizen I would like to extend my deepest apologies to the rest of the world. Please realise that there are 55million people in this country who know how awful the Bush administration is and we tried to change things, but our country is falling victim to a giant vacuum. Liberals, educated people, Democrats and any one who is open-minded at all will move to the coasts and larger cities, because the heartland of this country is currently a breeding ground for ignorance. America is dividing and it's making the conservative states worse. I do believe that as time moves on more people will embrace more liberal ideals, but it's going to take a long time, because we are fighting the conservative religious folks and they clearly will believe anything they are told and don't base their actions on rational thoughts or science.
Jen Grygiel is lead singer of the band the Steel Poniez.
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- Ceri Dingle
Bush, Kerry - Kerry, Bush.... For those of us concerned to put development on the map, for both ourselves and those in the developing world, this election and its contenders offered zilch. Despite a few murmurs about outsourcing to India, with Bush keen to do the right thing for the corporate sector and Kerry keen to promote a broader nationalist agenda with US jobs for US workers, neither is able to stand up for modernity or human advancement at home, never mind abroad.
Bush and Kerry don't talk about development - but there is also a problem with those who do. Influential development agencies have helped engender contemporary fears, discussing everything from poverty to environmental degradation in terrifying terms. Witness Jonathan Dimbleby's pre-US election programme on ITV, The New World War. He claimed that poverty is more of a threat than Osama bin Laden, arguing that the poor, forced to plunder the environment in order to survive, might ultimately destroy us all. The anti-globalist group Global Resistance has announced that if Bush is confirmed the winner they will hold a Global Funeral March in London for the death of the planet. With attitudes like these, it's no wonder serious development is off the agenda.
Many NGO activists presumed, despite a glaring lack of evidence, that the Democrats were the best option for the developing world. And although NGOs are not supposed to declare for any candidate, some of them campaigned to mobilise the vote, working in schools, colleges and elsewhere. But these were largely content-free escapades, which implied that the act of voting matters more than what you vote for. More voters do not necessarily make for a healthy civil society, instead leading to claims that 'I done my bit' - this is hardly a demand for political vision that might help improve humanity's lot. In the run up to the UK elections we would do well to learn the lessons, and have less 'rock the vote' and more political demands.
WORLDwrite will not be attending the global funeral march - and as charity director, rules or no rules, I have no problem declaring for neither presidential candidate. Instead I will spend the aftermath of this election campaigning for serious global development.
Ceri Dingle is director of WORLDwrite.Return to top
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Four more years of what? The debate starts here, by Mick Hume
spiked-issue: US election 2004
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