VALUES

Andrew Sullivan:

The war was not the issue. Gays were.

This narrative is shaping up pretty quickly: Bush won the election on values. The punditry have spoken. I don't completely agree with this conclusion.

In addition to being somewhat superficial, the "values!" analysis seems to me a way for a lot of pundits to compensate for having been blindsided by an issue on which the GOP has been successfully mobilizing for quite some time.

While it's undeniably true that "values" voters (or at least voters who named values as their primary motivation) made the difference in crucial states, I think it's a mistake to conclude that this means that these voters weren't concerned with the war, or even that concern over the war took a backseat to concerns over vaues.

The "moral values" pitch and the "war/terrorism" pitch are not exclusive of each other. It is the war on terror that created framework, or rather that enabled Bush to create a framework, from which to more effectively hang these other issues. He won because he was able to successfully weave values into his war agenda. Notice I don't say that he was able to weave his war agenda into his values agenda, because it is 9/11 and the war that allow him to speak in such Manichean terms, of a battle between tangible good and evil, and which have given this kind of talk such a substantial and receptive and motivated audience.

Anecdotally, I have a lot of this audience in my own extended family. I visited them a few months ago, and I was struck by a significant change in the tenor of the conversation. Talk of values and morals and the decline of America into a cesspool of crack smoking, butt sex, and rap music was always to be had, but it is the war that gave these concerns a much more immediate and more apocolyptic thrust. Armageddon is imminent. We are under siege by the forces of Satan. We must fight him and his allies. There can be no neutrality, and negotiation is tantamount to surrender. The forces of righteousness are on the move.

Incidentally, there is an Arabic word that describes this concept: jihad.

So what do we do about it, given that the war on terrorism is likely to persist for a long time to come? Obviously, you can't reason with people who believe that Satan actually physically stands over Osama bin Laden's shoulder and helps him pick targets. Again, speaking from experience, there's no arguing with such folk: if it ain't in the Bible or on Fox News, they ain't having it. I think the only thing to do is to concentrate, laser-like, on finding those people who can be reasoned with, and peeling off those votes one conversation at a time.