The people who elected Bush are afraid of freedom.
The breakdown of the 20th century order -- Cold War, traditional values, hard work rewarded with high pay -- has left them exposed and vulnerable in a world they do not control. Add in the threat of terrorism (real or inflated) and you have the makings of an authoritarian movement on the scale of Germany and Italy 80 years ago.
The American form of authoritarianism is not the totalitarian state, however. It is the conformist state.
And letting non-conformist homosexuals exercise their rights as if they had more freedom than the frightened masses is intolerable to them.
So they tried to affect the only thing that could help them restore control to their lives and close the door on the 21st century -- stop gay marriage, stop the cosmopolitan reality-based community that is adapting to the new order.
(Read Erich Fromm's "Escape from Freedom" for the full exegesis of this pyscho-social process.)
The good news is that this refusal to accommodate the 21st century is doomed. The future is not going to go away. Change is not going to stop. Freedom is going to demand a more rational response. And the reality-based community is not going to be overpowered.
In real terms, look at the progress made politically.
The Democrats now have a lock on a much broader piece of the U.S. Oregon and Washington aren't swing states. N.H. is voting Democratic. Nevada, N.M., and Colorado have become swing states. Virginia is teetering on the edge. Ohio almost went for Kerry. The last of the Dixiecrats have left the party -- and been replaced by Republican senators who want the death penalty for doctors who perform abortion (Coburn-OK), want to bar pregnant teachers from the classroom (DeMint-SC), and are deeply into pre-Alzheimer's dementia (Bunning-KY).
Kerry didn't lose because he was a Mass. liberal. He lost because he was the candidate of the reality-based community.
The campaign was not a debate over ideas or facts. Bush's lies didn't matter. This was TV with the sound off. Bush was the candidate of one half of the country. Kerry was the candidate of the other. No one was mistaking one for the other and no one was convinced by their arguments. (I mean, how could anyone vote for Bush because he made the stronger case for his presidency.) That's why the Bush campaign was always so confident. They knew what was going on -- the rest of us didn't.
It didn't matter who won the debates to the Bush voters.
It didn't matter who had the better plan, the better policies, the better powers of reason and judgment.
The Bush voters don't believe in reason, judgment, plans, policies, facts, evidence, truth, justice, democracy, freedom, the Enlightenment, Christianity, the 21st century, or history.
And that is why they will fail.
Matt Yglesias last spring had a brief discussion of the arguments for the existence of God. The participants went on for 40 posts making various scientific claims and counterclaims. And at the end, I pointed out that while they were debating a god of science, Western civilization is centered on a god of history.
And if you go looking for evidence of god there, you will find Him in every nook and cranny. That which we refer to as the Judaeo-Christian god is, under different colors, the historical process itself -- the process by which humanity becomes self-conscious and takes possession of its powers to create itself in its own image. A powerful metaphor and one that is vibrantly alive -- at least in the church my wife drags me to each week.
In those terms, the Bush voters have joined the Bush organization in turning away from the God of history. And the stories are true. He is a wise, but in some ways unforgiving god, who can lead his people back to themselves gently -- or with terrible force.
Those of us in the reality-based community can, ironically, draw some comfort in the knowledge that god and history are on our side.