The conventions have come and gone, and we learned a lot.
The Democrats staged an essentially flawless event. While many speakers were critical of McCain and the GOP, they were respectful and reasoned. Obama’s acceptance speech praised McCain for his military service and called him an honorable man. The speech included a lot of substance and some details of his positions. The audience throughout the four days was as diverse as America, with all age groups and ethnicities represented.
On the Republican side we got a steady stream of vitriol, lies, and continuing incompetence: the McCain camp botched the backdrop for his acceptance speech, showing the Walter Reed Middle School instead of the Walter Reed Medical Center. The Republicans would have us believe they’re competent enough to run the country, but they can’t even choose a photo properly.
And the audience at the GOP convention? It was almost 100% white; in fact, McCain had such a hard time getting minorities to show up that his campaign used stock photos of black people, taken off the internet, for his introductory video.
So there we have it: a choice as stark as night and day, as black and white.
What will it say about America if the majority chooses McCain over Obama? As I’ve said before, it will not be because people have been tricked or duped into voting against their interests.
For some, a vote for McCain will be based on a legitimate and rational calculus; those who are rich, for example, who don’t want to pay higher taxes, or those who believe that we need a more militaristic approach to our foreign policy challenges.
For many others, I fear that a vote for McCain will be an expression of a dangerous anti-intellectualism that is creeping across America: an ideology driven by imaginary grievances against “elites,” and the notion that somehow intellectual sophistication is a liability rather than an asset. These people cheer when Mitt Romney (who signed universal healthcare when he was governor of Massachusetts, and once supported gay rights and women’s rights), tells the GOP convention that we need to clear Washington of the “East Coast liberals” who have controlled the government for the past eight years. They cheer when the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani (who had multiple affairs, divorced twice, lived with a gay couple and dressed in drag), extols the virtues of “small-town” America against the evil forces of cosmopolitanism.
This creed is not conservative, it is reactionary; it holds an anti-enlightenment worldview in which facts simply do not matter.
The fact is that the world is becoming more inter-connected and complex by the day. A culture of anti-intellectualism will not be able to cope with these complexities; it will not be able to meet the many challenges we face, from climate change to terrorism to economic globalization.
The EU, China, India, and Brazil aren’t wasting time arguing over evolution, or whether a Harvard education is a good or bad thing. Yet listening to the GOP convention last week, what did we hear? A constant refrain of "culture war" references, and next to nothing about the real issues that face Americans.
If McCain wins, it would in some sense be easier to accept if we could blame it on stupidity and misinformation. What I am suggesting, however, would point to a deeper defect in the American electorate: the wholesale embrace of trivia over substance and resentment as a governing philosophy.
P.S. Maybe I'm simply wrong about the American voter. What do you think?
Jason Scorse