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Rise of the Moralistas

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Another guest post on the aftermath of the election. This one is the view from Boston by David Valdes Greenwood:

Rise of the Moralistas

On election day, while standing for three hours in the cold of Goffstown, New Hampshire, trying to get out the vote for Kerry, I bought a Bush supporter a cup of coffee.

No, actually, I bought an old lady a cup of coffee. At least 70, she reminded me of my late grandmother, a once-formidable woman who eventually shrank into a tiny bundle of wattles and wet eyes. Exhaustion lined the face peeking out from a purple scarf, and the woman's mittened hands nonetheless shook with cold. When she put down her Bush-Cheney sign to try to rub some warmth back into her hands, I couldn't bear it any longer -- I ran across the street and asked her how she liked her coffee. Startled and pleased, she asked for no sugar but lots of milk. And she praised God that I was such a blessing to her.

Therein likes my experience of this election. I really believed that my party, the Democrats, were trying to do the right thing: voting to protect the world as much as protect ourselves. I believed that in electing Kerry we could show that America is not simply aggressive and reactionary and willfully ignorant of human life. And I believed, as I volunteered in three states, that one person makes the difference anywhere that one person is.

What the old lady believed is that all things come from God. I wasn't a good human, doing my part; I was a blessing -- a gift from the same God who was in control of the election. And whatever you think of that notion, there is no denying how motivational it was for millions of Americans to believe that God called them to the polls, to claim their country in a battle upon which rests their afterlife every bit as much as their current life.

When the contest is between notions of the human and the divine -- at this time in our culture, at least -- we lose. The newspapers are reporting that "moral values" was ranked the number one issue in the election. And not lefty, humanist morals, thank you. As local, state, and national outcomes made clear, we're talking Moral Majority morals--deep Amish morals--morals that a priest would feel at home endorsing in the 1950s. This election was the pinnacle of a retrograde revolution that's been building for twenty years, and its partisans -- let's call them the moralistas -- are feeling pretty confident.

What we on the left have to learn is that simply abhorring the moralista mindset is not enough to overcome its power in the polling place. As righteous as we may feel, we will get nowhere moaning that it hardly seems moral to kill thousands of Iraqis to liberate them. The moralistas have an answer: didn't God destroy Sodom in that same neck of the woods, just to make a statement? And if it's good enough for God... (end of argument). There's a version of that answer for just about every claim we make about the alleged morals of those who returned George Bush to office; we only waste our time trying to convince a moralista that he or she is not moral.

I see no easy way to change this tide. But we cannot, as some are already suggesting, suddenly start nominating -- or, ourselves, becoming -- soft moralista knock-offs just to appease. We still have to champion the best of humanity in concrete and uncompromised progressive ideals: the morality of peace, the ethics of choice, the responsibility we have to focus on this world (and not just some celestial one to come).

We may well remain the political minority for a while -- just as the moralistas were for the first thirty years of my lifetime. And, if we take anything from them, it is how their past experience holds a lesson for our future: they did not rise to their power in this election by changing the values they held all along; for years, they put their heads down, dug in their heels, and fought for their values. And now, so must we.

- David Valdes Greenwood, Boston, MA - 11/4/03

Posted by rjt at November 4, 2004 10:48 AM