11/15/2004

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

“What Were They Thinking?” Talking to Bush Supporters

A standard reaction of Kerry supporters to the re-election of Bush was a baffled “What were those voters thinking?” That is a productive place for the losers in a democratic society to begin their analysis. But that question usually means something quite different, like “I can’t believe it! Were they out of their minds or just plain stupid?” That is not a very productive posture since it writes off half of your fellow citizens as somehow inferior to you in their perceptions, values, and intellect. If that were actually true, it would be hard to continue to believe in democracy as a viable approach to government.

Despite Bush’s declaration that the election gave him a mandate and the media’s portrayal of the vast majority of the nation as being a solid sea of “red” states, the truth is that the nation remains almost evenly divided. The “double digit” advantage that Republicans are said to have in the sea of red covering most of the inland states really boils down to the choices made this time around by about five percent of the voters. Changing the minds of that small a percentage of the electorate would dramatically change the color of that familiar map.

In particular, the Mountain West is clearly not uniformly Republican territory. In Montana, Democrats captured most of the statewide offices and won control of at least one house of the legislature while also voting for Bush. That is actually more typical of the outcome of recent elections in the West than the sea of red on the media maps. Besides splitting their votes among Democrats and Republicans, Montanans also ignored a multi-million dollar campaign aimed at convincing them to change their minds about the use of cyanide in mining. They also showed that they were not narrow-minded puritans and joined the growing Western-based movement to allow limited legal use of marijuana while taxing heavily the far more dangerous drug, tobacco.

Much has been made of the Republican’s success in mobilizing church-goers while characterizing Democrats as hostile to people of faith. Although, for now, there is an element of truth to this, it is not at all clear that even evangelical Christians are a natural conservative constituency. Republicans, after all, did not create the modern evangelical Christian movement. This nation, across its history, has regularly gone through periods of religious revival, largely centered outside of the mainline churches. These emotional and personal forms of Christianity are not necessarily politically conservative. The New Testament, after all, the founding scriptures of Christianity, emphatically states that materialism, wealth and power are impediments to spirituality. The New Testament also calls on us to take responsibility for our neighbors, especially those less fortunate than ourselves. It speaks in terms of forgiveness and resistance to the human urge to violence. It was a radical message two millennia ago and can be a transforming message today. In the context of the New Testament, it is hard to believe that Jesus was a Republican advocate for profit, inequality, multinational corporate control of the world, environmental ruin, and a life of mindless consumption.

The point is that evangelical Christians are as complex a group of people as the rest of us. When the full range of their religious values is taken into account, it is not obvious that one partisan group is more likely to win their allegiance than another. After all, it was the evangelical black churches that provided the support for the civil rights movement.

The same can be said about the Catholic Church. For over a century a series of Popes have called for social justice to temper the inequality generated by market economies. That laid the early foundation for the liberation theology of the late 20^th century that inspired Catholic leaders in many poorer nations to support radical social and political movements. Catholic leaders today oppose capital punishment and the Pope actively opposed the invasion of Iraq. Again, Catholic’s religious-related values are a complex mix that is not necessarily tipped in one partisan direction or another.

Until the 1980s, America’s churches, including the evangelical churches, were nonpartisan. They were focused, instead, on the personal religious experience and how it could transform an individual’s life. The “new right” saw the opportunity to turn those churches in a partisan direction by emphasizing narrow wedge issues like school prayer, abortion, and gay rights, in effect plucking out a tiny number of issues and values while conveniently ignoring the other religious values in conflict with the New Right’s agenda. The fact that the right has been incredibly successful at this should not be taken as a sign that this outcome was inevitable or irreversible.

Which brings me back to my original point: Dismissing those who voted differently than you did as holding incomprehensible, alien values is political suicide. You should be asking “What were they thinking?” but in an honest and respectful way. It is only when you take your neighbors seriously and engage them in honest dialogue that you stand some chance of understanding their values enough to possibly change their minds or, possibly, having your own mind changed. And that, after all, is what democracy is all about.