LONDON: If the polls are right, and I begin to think that they might be, then George Bush will be re-elected in November. And we on the left and centre-left of politics will somehow have to account for it.
Popular explanations will include a rubbish Democrat campaign, corporate campaign money, the machinations of the rightwing media, Republican dirty tricks and - above all - the suggestion that Americans are dumb. Today we're doing dumb.
The argument goes something like this. Bush and the Republicans stand for policies that actively and rather obviously damage the ordinary American. If Jo Schmo was in her right mind she would realize what was going on and vote John Kerry.
She won't, so she isn't. Therefore her behaviour and beliefs are so out of trim with her "natural" interests and her "real" experience that her consciousness, as Marx would have said, is false.
A couple of weeks ago a book was published in America that elaborated on exactly this theme. What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank (Metropolitan Books) gazes on "a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch".
In this Bedlam of irrational behaviour - the state where the working-classes vote Republican - small farmers vote themselves off the land, proud parents ensure that their kids will never get to college or afford good healthcare and stolid factory-workers vote for closures and regional decline.
But why do they do this? There must be a reason. Frank finds it, essentially, in Christian fundamentalism. The Republicans offer to sell homophobia, anti-feminism and covert racism to the dumb folks of Kansas, but what they actually buy is big-business liberalism and globalization. They are gulled by the oldest trick of all, the one that gets the victim to look somewhere else.
But suppose, for a moment, that the Kansas voters aren't so dumb. Suppose, first, that they don't buy the economic prospectus unwittingly along with the social populism, but consciously because they actually agree with it - because (and this hurts) it does actually tie in with their concrete experience.
In other words, their consciousness is not false at all. Why might a poor person be opposed to tax increases and social benefits? Possibly because they hope to be richer themselves, maybe because they believe that high benefits are a disincentive to work and conceivably they believe both because that is exactly what they see happening around them - folks getting rich and folks idling.
We, of course, tend not to look at things in this harsh way. But as the best book I have read recently about the US - The Right Nation: Why America is Different, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (Penguin Press) - points out, American history and optimism are different. If you want, say, Hispanic votes, you don't go on about welfare - Mexican immigrants aren't big on it.
And European social democrats have to concede that there is such a thing as a disincentive to work. As Will Hutton pointed out, writing about Germany in last Sunday's Observer, one "vital prerequisite to restoring German economic health" is for the authorities to "stop offering what amounts to a generous pension for life", cutting it down to something that tides people over between jobs.
Then there's the question of the alternative. If the problem, as formulated by one Democrat commentator, is that the Republicans "destroy the farm subsidies that have kept family farms out of the hands of giant, corporate mega-farms, deregulate every industry including the once dominant aircraft industry, and ship the rest of the jobs overseas or get underpaid migrant labour to fill the positions," then the answers would appear to be to increase farm subsidies, tightly regulate domestic aircraft production, increase protectionism and place restrictions on migrant labour.
This is a formulation that would find favour with Pat Buchanan and the populist palaeo-conservatives, but it is hardly likely to resonate with modern voters who surmise - rightly - that the outside world cannot be locked out. It would also not find much favour with us here in Europe.
No, the problem is the same problem as it always is really - giving people something better and believable to vote for. Starting from where they are. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
