A Post-Election Day Meditation

Now that the results are in, there already are, and no doubt will continue to be, pleas for bipartisan cooperation; for reaching across the aisle; for putting aside partisan preferences in favor of working toward the common good.

On the face of it, this seems unlikely. As several of the talking heads pointed out last night, campaigning in 2012 cost something like 6 billion dollars and resulted in nothing more than the maintenance of the status quo ante. Despite Mr. Obama's election night contention that there is not a real split in the American people, the election results themselves seem to deny that.

One can hope that it does not turn out that our elected representatives continue to act as they have in the recent past.  Predicting the future on the basis of the present is almost always wrong, so maybe everyone involved will come to see things in a different way. It is devoutly to be wished.

I am skeptical, not because of the election result numbers but because I think that they reflect something very deep and very real. I don't know how to label it; I suspect that many will try to do so in the next few years. But I think that there has been a profound shift in the zeitgeist, a re-defining of the dominant cultural paradigm and that this election, even more than the election of 2008, manifested this. This election was contested on many different levels of political, economic, social, and cultural consideration, but I think that the single most significant element was that Mr. Obama --- and, by extension, his organization and those who ran in other races who reflected his point of view --- not only embraced but embodied the characteristics of that new paradigm.

To vote for Mr. Obama was, as his favorite slogan had it, to be "Forward" thinking, feeling, and acting; to vote against him was akin to trying to hold back the tide.

This is intuitive, of course, but my sense is that what it comes down to for many people is a choice between being progressive or reactionary; to be in favor of moving forward or in favor of trying to prevent moving forward.

(This raises the question of what form a genuinely conservative [as opposed to reactionary] response --- or alternative --- could be to these new social and cultural realities. After 1945, when the Republican party had become a political afterthought, a conservative intellectual movement articulated a coherent and attractive position that eventuated in the Reagan presidency. That coherent set of ideas, and the authentic coalition that grew around it, are gone. Mr. Romney and his campaign were obviously not the people to develop, articulate, sell, and govern by a conservative vision appropriate to our time and circumstances. Will there be such a person and what will be that vision? But these questions are for another time.)

The point here is that the chances of there being a bi-partisan approach are, as the old line has it, slim and none. Of the many reasons that I think this is true, to me the most significant is that this is not just a political or economic divide; it is not just an ideological divide; it is a philosophical divide. To the people actively involved in electoral politics, the stakes seem ever and ever higher, and each side sees itself on the side of right.

(I am reminded of the Bob Dylan song "With God On Our Side." Maybe we ought to lock them all in a room and force them to listen to that over and over until they come to their senses.)

Last night someone suggested that the President call for a kind of summit meeting of the major players and that it should be away somewhere; Camp David, for example. Maybe away from the "noise" of the Capital, they could concentrate on addressing the issues.

I would suggest, rather, a Humility workshop. As long as all the players are absolutely --- even arrogantly --- convinced of their own rightness and see the opposition as mindlessly refusing to go along with what is obviously right, there will be no bi-partisanship and we will continue to beat on one another. We will, as the post-modernist/multi-cultural folks like to say, "other" one another.

As Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see."

This means you.