From The Editor’s Desk
One Value America
Andrew Garib, Turn Left Values are supposed to be what we cherish most. They’re what define our moral lives. And importantly, they’re how we define what we think we should place value in. This truism makes it seem odd that a majority of sixty million people who voted for George W. Bush on 2 November cited ‘values’ as the main determinant in their decision: Bush supporters, in fact, seemed to have slipped into ethical amnesia at the polls. Perhaps this election, less than any other in decades, was truly about the core beliefs of the American people — the story was not values, but a conspicuous lacking thereof.
Once Canada, Europe, and the rest of the world’s blue states settle down from the hyperventilation brought on by the shock of a Kerry loss into the more practical but equally undignified slow, tense breathing of a teller whose bank is presently being ransacked by armed thugs, the world living in a ‘reality-based community’ must finally come to grips with the fact that the American people have spoken. Mr. Bush defeated the ponderous junior Senator from Massachusetts by a small but significant margin. Record turnout fell to the side of security moms, Catholics, NASCAR dads, and the rest of W’s adoring fan base enraptured by the Stockholm syndrome of Dick Cheney’s histrionic fear mongering and the worst shades of terrorist blackmail ever captured on a handicam. Without a razor-thin margin of defeat or an election fiasco in Florida, the final analysis — the blame — lays squarely on the American people.
The explanation for the embarrassment of a legitimate Bush second term isn’t simply fear. It’s probably true that for whatever warped Murdochesque reason voters were scared enough of a Kerry presidency to elect the worst possible candidate for the first time. But values are clearly the key. And yet it’s certainly not that people voted for values — but rather, that they held a referendum on whether certain values are even worth mentioning. Only fear, the one emotion most honestly capturing the value of bodily integrity, won out.
Democrats this time around (and, it seems, every damned election) depended on higher youth turnout for a victory. But young adults, like America, don’t have their priorities straight. The same young Americans who feigned interest in politics at the height of P. Diddy’s ‘Buy My Merc or Die’ campaign chose, instead of the get-out-the- vote message emblazoned across Mariah Carey’s chest, the supple silicone beneath. At least for young Americans, voter apathy could have been expected to continue its pitiful trend. Can we say the same for the rest of Americans? Were grown-up Americans, too, lured by the deep cleavage and warm feelings associated with the ‘right’ thing to do — the vote for strength without judgment, power without responsibility, and risk without reward? Were Americans, just as the young were taken by the non-vote, taken by the one-value vote?
First, let’s dispel one myth. Kerry and the Dems did a great job — no one except GWB and every Prime Minister of India has ever earned 54 M votes. We can talk tactics until the donkeys and elephants come home, but when it came down to it, the problem really wasn’t the Kerry campaign. It’s that the one-value Americans outnumbered the two-or-more value Americans. If Bush’s campaign staff can claim any part of their victory, it was the effective torching of all major issues except for those they had a chance on — namely, and only, the War on Terrorism.
It’s pretty clear that if more Americans were multi-valued, they’d have voted for Kerry. Of course fighting terrorism should be a priority — very few Americans could conscionably say otherwise — but the costs of relegating our environment, our fiscal and economic policies, and the rights of women and minorities, among other issues, to second-tier importance are simply too high. That would mean (and excuse me for using such a blatant cliché) that the terrorists have won. Really.
And of course the Bush campaign would want you to believe that terrorism is the only real issue, and that all other issues play second fiddle: Bush’s only point of significant strength in issue-based polling was in the War on Terrorism, with Kerry matching or beating Bush in almost everything from the environment, to the economy, to health care, and even to the war in Iraq. At least we can be assured that many Americans were alive to most of the pitiful inadequacies of Bush policies. ‘Need some wood’? Please.
But here’s the kicker. Maybe the ones voting for Mr. Bush are the people who most dearly want a one-value vote. Think about how much easier life would be. With terrorists, or against them? Like freedom, or oppose freedom? Make America strong, agree or disagree? Vote here. That’s it. Forget the issues, the candidates, the geopolitics, the social and economic problems, and the environment. Forget obligations, treaties, moral compulsions and legal requirements. Just bestow your stamp of approval.
Perhaps the underlying problem of the unidimensional vote is that it plays so easily into our laziness in informing ourselves about the issues that impact our nation and in our thoughtful prioritizing among these issues. Misleading and divisive tunnel-vision presidency is easy to deal with at the ballot box: with us or against. And if you’re with, you’re not with for a variety of reasons. You’re with for only one. (Unless, of course, you really, really, really hate homosexuals.)
Who’s responsible for our lack of interest in the details of the world we live in? We are. I find it amazing how some liberals like to blame Rupert Murdoch, and not his FOX News-viewing customers, for the increasing gap between reality and Bush conservatives. Are we to explain the growth of FOX News into the 24-hour news channel with the highest election-time domestic ratings simply in terms of FOX’s shady journalism?
Ironically, the much-touted ‘outfoxed effect’ — the idea that more moderate 24 hour news channels are being forced to reflect more conservative analysis and opinion in the wake of FOX’s growing popularity — only strengthens the argument that power is in the hands of the consumer, not just the crooked salesman. The fact is, FOX is popular because viewers like to be intellectually coddled. They relish analysis that’s shallow and predetermined, if extant. People of all political stripes would rather have pre-processed judgments prepared for them rather than bothering to think for themselves.
When it comes down to it, people are responsible for what they watch and learn and believe. Most importantly, people are responsible for what they value. If you’d like to live in the fairyland where we’re winning the War on Terrorism one 500-lbs. bomb at a time, where de-fanging the EPA and axing environmental protection laws will make our air and water cleaner, and where protracted and unfair tax cuts are the means to stable growth, then you have an option: bask in the glow of FOX News and buy land in America’s ‘faith-based’ community. There, you’ll never have to think about those things again.
Perhaps sophistication in moral beings and voters alike is being able to accommodate the multiplicity of human values and different strata amongst them. Having one single value — bodily integrity — is the least sophisticated version possible. Even if the majority of Americans disagreed with George Bush on an overwhelming majority of issues, only one, terrorism, was valued enough for Americans to decide their vote.
If anything, Americans should strive to cherish a least a second value: the value of learning and interest in political participation. This one value is sufficient to open a world of other valuations beside physical safety. But it takes time, thought, some reading and a bit of guts for this to come to fruition. I’m wondering if Americans will be up to the challenge by 2008, if within my lifetime. I’m wondering, too, if Americans — one value- vote Americans — in the meantime understand the consequences of living the one-value lie.
In a world of one value, we give up everything America is about. In one-value America, security comes before the habeas corpus rights of Muslim men in America, before the right of women to earn the same money for the same job, and the rights of all Americans to live in a clean, healthy environment, with adequate healthcare and respect for their privacy.
Although George Bush is hardly a totalitarian warlord, the one-value fallacy he so heartily espouses is the oldest trick in the despot’s arsenal of eradicating opposition by instilling fear into his citizens and eviscerating mechanisms guaranteeing individual rights. In authoritarian countries, those remaining few who are alive to the plot are quietly disposed of. But this is America. We multi-valued American voters are alive and in full force. It will be up to us to help instill in our fellow citizens — if they are willing — that second value of learning and civic participation, and open the possibility once again for a thinking nation embracing the multiplicity of the very values that define it.
In this, my last editorial as Editor in Chief of Turn Left, there’s no better opportunity to renew this paper’s commitment to espousing a plurality of styles, views and values. There is no better time than now to fulfill our pledge to encourage that second value, learning and participation, and provide a forum for our readers and writers alike to champion their values and causes.
The worst America that we can present to the world is a nation of unsophisticated
morality and singular vision. It will be up to all of us, as it always has been, to stake a
claim for a complex, intelligent and relevant morality. Without that, I’m afraid, we might
as well abandon literacy, democracy and inclusive progressive society — and in the end
thoughtlessly vote with only one value in mind. 
Published 04.11.18 00:00:00 -0500 GMT
Posted by Andrew Garib on 04.11.18 
Created: 05.12.04 