A Single Comment on the American Election

The two-year electoral horse race is enough to make even the most zealous political supporter want to smash their TV when the news comes on, so I'm loathe to even mention it, but I feel I have an important comment to make. I promise this is the only post I will write on the American elections until 2012. I was talking to Sherwood on the bus one day that I was blown away by McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. To me, it seems absolutely insane to make an inexperienced religious nut your choice for one of the most powerful positions in the world. But the fact that even though I and all of my friends are bewildered by this decision, the American electorate is supportive, shows something very important about politics in the U.S: the Republican almost-half of the country is very different to us.

From a liberal perspective, Sarah Palin is barely an improvement over Dick Cheney, which is saying a lot. Sarah Palin is pro-life, corrupt, inexperienced, and her church is closely affiliated with a movement that believes that they must train a spiritual army of God to combat the supernatural forces of evil present on the planet. This is a movement so crazy, even other American evangelical churches call them nuts. Ideologically, Sarah Palin is crazier than Dick Cheney, only she wouldn't wield the same power as Vice-President.

However, I think that it's fair to say that the liberal opinion of Sarah Palin isn't as important to this race as the republican opinion is. What confused me for so long is how she appeals to conservatives. Obviously, she wasn't a disastrous choice, or McCain would no longer be tied with Obama in the polls. Sherwood and I were specifically discussing Palin's pregnant teenage daughter: not because we consider teenage pregnancy a crime, but because Republicans seem to with their emphasis on family values. But values are really where the split between Republicans and Democrats becomes most evident.

There's a kind of continuum of reasoning among Republican voters, from those who are from religious to moral to economic conservatives. McCain has no trouble winning over economic conservatives because he talks the small-government, low-spending talk, even if Bush said the same things and it was bullshit. He might win over some moral conservatives, but Obama is a candidate of considerable integrity and charisma, and I think moral conservatives are most likely to be independent. Among the religious, McCain has very little support because he seems to be evangelical only because he has to. Until recently, McCain was in favour of Roe v. Wade. Although Bush had great success in mobilizing the religious to come out and vote, the religious are lukewarm about McCain.

Enter Palin. As an economic conservative, you'd really have to believe the bullshit to support her, as she was one of the worst offendors when it came to pork-bill projects, such as the infamous bridge to nowhere, and questionable spending of public funds. As a moral conservative, however, she really helps McCain, because she's a small-town, pro-life woman who is seen to have strong family values. But her real appeal lies with the religious, where as a true evangelical with strong beliefs and values, she may help to mobilize this important section of the base.

It seemed odd at first, but the fact that she has a pregnant daughter hasn't harmed McCain's candidacy. In a stunning depressingly normal act of hypocrisy, Bill O'Reilly defended Palin, saying that teenage pregnancy was normal and acceptable, and that the parents were blameless, even though he'd called the Spears family 'pinheads' and strongly criticized them for Jamie Lynn Spears' pregnancy (cf. The Daily Show.) Although Republicans believe in family values, they accept Palin's daughter's pregnancy because by keeping the baby, she is demonstrating her family's cohesion, as well as their pro-life beliefs. Who knows whether her daughter actually had a choice: so far as I'm concerned, it really is a private matter, and Sarah Palin is the real issue.

It's not hard to understand economic conservatives. As the noted economist J.K. Galbraith once said, "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." The Conservative Party of Canada is mostly economically conservative, and although they are morally conservative, emphasising family values and tradition, they are far more liberal than an American moral conservative. To a certain extent, Liberals ignore the importance of values to Canadian conservatives, but it's when we look at Republicans where we really miss the point. Democrats generally value experience and policy, and reason plays an important role, although Democrats can be stupid and irrational as well. Although Republicans look at experience and policy, they also look at values and religion, and are thus considerably more irrational. It's the irrationality of half of the American electorate that makes it so difficult to understand, but to ignore religion and value in American politics is to ignore the elephant in the room.