So he did it after all. The exit polls -- surprise surprise -- were once again totally wrong. President Bush looks as if he has won not only the required number of seats in Congress but the popular vote, too. Of course it's not over yet. And it will be some time before a breakdown of the vote is provided. But at this early stage, a couple of things seem particularly interesting.

First off, it looks as if there was a significant vote for Bush by immigrant groups. If so, this might simply be because of his liberal immigration policy. But I suspect that the war against terror loomed large in immigrant-American minds and that's why they voted Bush. And that's probably because, as immigrants, they understand very well indeed the superiority and benefits of the American way of life, the horrors and violence of cultures which do not suscribe to democracy and human rights, and the fragility of the American values they so treasure when they are attacked by an enemy rooted in death-dealing cultures. In short, immigrant-Americans feel vulnerable and don't have the luxury of the upper-class Democrat disdain for security and the tough choices that need to be made to defend it.

The second point is that America has divided again not on economic but on cultural grounds. Bush won in rural, blue-collar areas where voters rate moral issues as most important. Kerry carried the urban, intellectual, professional areas where economy, education and Iraq were considered the key issues -- and where, no doubt, the moral agenda is regarded as 'fundamentalist', 'red-necked' and 'bigoted'.

The third point is that the conservative agenda has now entrenched itself deeply in the broader US government machine, with even the Senate Democrat leader Tom Daschle actually losing his seat in South Dakota.

From all this, it seems to me that at a time of war and unprecedented threat, the American electorate overall is circling its wagons. It is reaffirming the core values of the civilisation that it well understands is in peril, and rejecting those who are either undermining those values or at the very least choose to do nothing but ineffectually wring their hands as they are attacked, both from within and from without. At the same time, however, the country is clearly deeply divided, with many of the educated classes in particular falling into the latter category. Defeated once again at the ballot box, they will doubtless redouble their efforts through the intellectual and cultural institutions that they dominate.

A propos of which, the BBC went into mourning as soon as it became plain that Bush had won. Radio Four's Today programme undermined the ostensible balance of its intervewee list by the tone and premise of much of the questioning, which looked at the result from a Kerry perspective along the lines of: 'is-it-all-completely-hopeless-or-even-at-this-late-stage-can-anything- be-done-to-avoid-this-disaster?' While on TV, BBC Breakfast rounded off its show by interviewing the passionately anti-Bush writer Bonnie Greer and the passionately anti-Bush Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell.

Round two of the war within the west is about to begin.

Posted by melanie at November 3, 2004