The Republic Of Fear

George Bush has won, and he has won by a decisive four million votes. To understand the transformation of American politics that this represents, one needs only to remember that four years ago he received half a million votes less than Al Gore, and only won because his brother Governor Jeb Bush and the US Supreme Court, between them, handed him the 27 electoral college votes of Florida. This time he has gathered almost five million votes more than a much stronger Democratic rival, John Kerry, despite having an almost unblemished record of failure as a president. This complete disconnect between performance and reward is the most ominous indicator of where America is likely to go in the next few years.

By the time the voting took place, I had been in the US for two weeks. I had spent at least two hours each day discussing the coming election and another two hours surfing television channels and the Internet to get an idea of how Americans were thinking. But revelation finally came only hours before the vote began to be counted, in a men's changing room. Two white American men who heard me and my companion discussing Kerry's chances began to sniff audibly. Bush, they said when we brought them into the conversation, was bound to win and deserved to do so. Kerry was a coward and a liar who was unfit to lead the nation when it was "at war". When I asked them how they knew he was a coward, they said, "Because we are Americans. We know."

That single remark, which they made repeatedly to two people whom they believed to be naturalised Americans, summed up the ocean of frustration, envy and fear that has driven this election. Frustration and envy because non-white immigrants are taking more and more of the top jobs and prize places in their colleges and universities and marginalising the 'real' Americans. Fear because their world, which was already getting more and more insecure because of the collapse of the trade unions, the disappearance of blue-collar jobs, the replacement of white-collar ones by the computer, and the assault on small business establishments by giant trading conglomerates like Walmart and Best Buy, has been turned into a truly frightening place by the 9/11 attack.

When I pressed them on how precisely they knew Kerry was a coward, they said, "He has refused to allow his military record to be opened." This was a piece of Republican 'disinformation' but I let it pass and remarked, "But Kerry at least went to Vietnam and fought. Bush dodged the draft." "That doesn't matter," they said in chorus. "With Bush you know where you stand. He is not pretending to be what he is not."

For good measure, they extolled his tax cuts. "I have been able to hire two extra men because of them and I will hire more," one of them said. "But what about the deficit? Bush is running the nation into bankruptcy," my friend asked. "The deficit does not matter," they replied. "What about the 500 billion-dollar balance of payments deficit?" we persisted. "That doesn't matter either," came the stock reply. "We can keep running balance of payments deficits forever. The world will keep buying dollars." I let that pass too.

What struck me most forcefully was their utter disregard for facts and their lack of interest in holding Bush accountable for the mistakes he had made. It was a frame of mind that I had obtained glimpses of in chance conversations, overheard remarks, and in television debates. But only on November 2 did I appreciate its true power. A spate of revelations had shown that the Bush administration had deliberately manoeuvred the country into an unnecessary war that had killed nearly 1,200 Americans and permanently disabled three to four times that number. It had failed to capture Osama bin Laden and instead created a huge new recruiting ground for Al Qaeda in Iraq.The economy had a million fewer jobs than four years earlier. Five million more people could not afford health insurance, which meant that when they were forced to buy medicines for which they paid 10 times as much as their insured peers. Two per cent more of America had slipped under the poverty line.

But none of this mattered. For it was in the industrial 'rust belt' of the Midwest, which had suffered the most, that Bush took the maximum number of votes away from the Democrats. Ohio, which finally decided the outcome of the elections, had actually suffered the most under Bush, for fully one quarter of the jobs lost were concentrated there.

In the end, this election was not just a battle between two political parties, but an epic conflict between reason and fear. Bush played skilfully and cynically on the peoples' paranoia, and Reason lost. But it was not solely the skilful use he made of fear that propelled the Republican victory. That only served to push an overwhelmingly white and predominantly male component of the American population, which believes that America is being stolen from it in a dozen different ways by 'foreigners', into endorsing a return to Christian fundamentalism at home and a mindless confrontation with foreigners abroad.

When fear defeats reason, democracy is imperilled. That is the sword of Damocles that half of America and the rest of the world will have to live under for at least the next four years. It could be a lot longer.