Revolution

One US congressman put it most aptly, I think. He described the last elections a “quiet revolution.”

Yes, Virginia, elections could be revolutions too. Revolutions are not just about blood in the streets and skirmishes in the hills. Revolutions are, above all, widely shared visions and passions spilling into every arena — the most participative of arenas being the electoral process.

In the long electoral marathon that the US has, it was clear that the Obama campaign perfectly understood what was at stake. They designed their campaign accordingly, transforming party politics into a mass movement that brought out record levels of voter turnout.

John McCain did not understand what was going on. And Sarah Palin was completely clueless.

The Republican ticket insisted on appealing to what they called the “real” America: the small towns of the heartland, a revivalist image of the “average” American, or, more banal, the “Joe Six-pack” that Palin loved to talk about.

But that was an illusion. There is no “real America.” There was an Old America and a New America.

The Republicans were addressing a nation that was no longer there. It existed only in the delusions of the Christian Right, the neoconservatives and the brain-dead personalities who had overrun the party and discredited its economic policy positions.

The Republican ticket could offer no new ideas, engender no new passions and inspire renewed hope. All they could do was mount a campaign that stoked fear about the unknown and mudsling the opposing side.

Last Tuesday, the New America came out from under the covers, lined up to vote, volunteered for door-to-door campaigns and produced a landslide for the man who personified an emerging new nation: Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton was wrong: this fight was not about gender and “glass ceilings.” She thought about it in this manner and succumbed.

John McCain was wrong: this fight was no longer about Big Government against Small Government. His rhetoric worked around this theme and he succumbed.

Barack Obama correctly understood that this was not about race, it was not about holding the future hostage to remedying the past. He gave one speech about race early in the campaign and then put the matter on the shelf.

The debate now is about the contours of a new politics that is post-race. A politics that is also post-gender.

It may also be argued that this is a new politics that has gone beyond conservative and liberal. It is about accepting that profound change had happened and it is high time politics reflected it. It is about new realities and old virtues.

The new realities in the US are about global warming and the need for a lifestyle revolution, the decaying institutions and the need to reinvest in building them, the decadent culture and the need to imbue it with the traditional values of hard work, prudence, faith and patriotism.

By 2015, the minorities in the US — African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Latinos — will, together outnumber the European-Americans. The minorities, having become the majority, takes out any meaning from that category. American society, a society of immigrants, shall then have become simply a plural society.

With the evaporation of minorities, affirmative action — the stuff of classical liberal doctrine — becomes meaningless. Affirmative action can no longer be the agenda of the Democratic Party.

As American society evolves quickly into one where there ethnically is no majority and therefore no minority, leadership must communicate with constituencies in new terms. Obama put it well in his very first speech before the party convention four years ago: there are no “red states” or “blue states”, only the United States of America.

The data shows that a majority of white men voted for McCain. So did a majority of white women. But that did not suffice to constitute an electoral majority simply because the demographics had so dramatically changed.

The Republicans won a large majority of all the counties. But the Democrats carried nearly all the cities. That was where the populations were.

The Republicans, in their present incarnation, will probably continue to enjoy the support of the rednecks in Kansas and Alabama and Texas. But that base cannot shape the future of the vast, more cosmopolitan populations of the urban areas. They have neither the intellect, nor the lifestyle, nor the purchasing power nor the numbers to do so.

I agree with the American political analysts who say that the beginning of the Republicans’ resounding defeat happened when McCain chose Palin to be his running mate. By doing so, he lurched back to the past, reached out to the farms for votes and lost the cities.

When Obama beat Clinton in the primaries, he also reinvented the Democratic Party, taking it away from the unions and the affirmative action activists, rebuilding its basis in the virtual communities in cyberspace, the young and the multicultural communities.

How the Republican Party can rebuild itself from the ashes of a devastating defeat and the visionless regime of George W. Bush is anybody’s guess. If they try to reach further back to the past, this party will degenerate into a cult.