1988. Willie Horton. The Pledge of Allegiance. The “card-carrying member of the ACLU”. George H.W. Bush, with Lee Atwater at the controls, ran a campaign that was almost completely free from issues and instead turned on equal parts “you never had it so good” and visceral appeals against The Other. Never mind that Michael Dukakis was as radical as warm milk. (Side note: stop trying to make Massachusetts candidates happen, America. They aren’t happening.)
From there, the Perot split, the Congressional realignment as senior Democrats packed it in, and the decision by the GOP to place its destiny in the hands of Southern leadership. Newt Gingrich, of course, and Trent Lott and Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell and Bob Livingston and Dick Armey and ultimately, George W. Bush, aided and abetted the whole way by the rise of AM talk radio (with Rush Limbaugh as the apotheosis of Republican thought) and then by Fox News and ultimately by the creation of the entire media ecosystem necessary to nurture an entire alternate reality.
In this world, it was Mitt Romney who was the stalwart conservative, rather than a complete political cipher. It was a world where anything involving the seashore was obviously Obama’s Katrina, where the confusion around an attack on an American embassy was a bigger cover-up than Watergate and a bigger scandal than “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US”. It was a world where rolling the dice on saving General Motors, or on taking the shot at killing the aforementioned Bin Laden, were things that weren’t important when Bush couldn’t or didn’t do them, and then became things that were easy and obvious and no-brainers once Obama had done them.
Mostly, though, it was a world free from objective measurement. The employment figures and economic indicators are suddenly ticking back the President’s way? Obviously being doctored by evil government bureaucrats. Polling numbers that showed Romney leaping forward after the first debate are now showing him slipping? Obviously those polls are being manipulated by a biased media. Statistical analysis of the state-by-state by a fastidious statistician, whose math is out there to be checked and who ran 49 of 50 states in 2008, shows Obama in the lead? Obviously he is a mendacious little weasel whose very manhood is open to debate, and whose conclusions have less validity than the gut feelings of a has-been speechwriter. No, Peggy Noonan just knows how things will turn out.
And yet.
Barack Obama won re-election last night, with electoral college votes and popular votes both in excess of anything George W. Bush ever got when he claimed his “mandate” to spend his political capital on disemboweling Social Security. He won all the critical states that Mitt Romney had to swing in order to win: Ohio, Virginia, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and (in all likelihood) Florida. The Romney-Ryan ticket became the first in forty years to lose the home states of both its ticket nominees (Paul Ryan’s much-vaunted hometown of Jamestown, Wisconsin went decisively for the President). And the Senate – in a year where the Democrats were defending more seats and were in a vulnerable position – will convene in January with at least two more Democrats added to the majority.
Karl Rove created his own reality, sure enough. And last night it collided with actual reality, and the result was…well, the result was a complete epistemic meltdown on Fox News around 11 PM Eastern. Half a billion dollars lit on fire in the cause of convincing America that the truth is other than what could be measured by reason and logic and empirical evidence. It didn’t work.
In fact, this really was the last call for the Old Ones, and it showed – things we thought had been settled decades ago were suddenly dredged up as issues that were supposedly in debate. We had to argue about things like whether insurance was obligated to cover birth control, whether rape pregnancies were some sort of divine blessing, whether – again, inevitably – whether the President of the United States was legally entitled to citizenship and eligibility for his office. And the GOP thought these were winning issues, and the party in the electorate convinced themselves they were winning positions to take.
And then the rest of the world failed to participate in their reality.
Look, I endorse Obama for a reason, because he’s like me: liberal in goals and conservative in sensibility. By rights, in a world that didn’t have its head up its ass, I would probably be a Red Tory. But conservatism in this country is entirely bound up with the South and its sensibilities: the big mules, the wealthy and powerful, securing themselves in their position by constantly whipping up the working classes into a fury of bigotry and ignorance to lash out against The Other. Black, gay, foreign, smart, it doesn’t matter. Right now, in 2012, this is all the GOP has, and as of this morning, it’s officially not enough. And as the nonwhite population of the country grows, as young voters continue to turn out in reliably advantageous Democratic numbers, as the ability to win an election entirely with an aging white base who remembers segregation dwindles, it may never be enough again.
Hippie-punching won’t get you into heaven anymore, Republicans. It’s time to start the 21st century.