[Ed. Note: Hiya, kids! Sorry it’s taken so long to get the rest of my election analysis up for public consumption, but Real Life sometimes pulls even me away from the keyboard, and besides, it’s taken me a while to figure out exactly what I want to say about all this “moral values” stuff. If you missed Part I of this post or you just want to refresh your memory, click here. As always, I invite you to skip this one if you’re tired of reading about politics or don’t have time for a lengthy rant.]

[Ed. Note 2: the language in this post is a little rough in spots, so consider yourself warned.]

The post-election discussion has focused mainly on John Kerry’s loss, which makes sense since the presidential race always gets the most media attention. However, Democrats also lost seats in both houses of Congress this year as well as in many state governments. (From what I understand, we apparently did fairly well at the local, grass-roots level. Go figure.) While I personally believe there are a number of reasons for these defeats, the pundits and bloggers have been looking for a one-size-fits-all explanation. The one they seem to have fixed upon is exit-poll data which suggest that “moral values” were the deciding factor for a significant number of people.

I’ve been struggling to process exactly what that is supposed to mean, since all elections are, in one way or another, about moral values. After all, we vote for the people whom we believe share our philosophies and against those we believe to be corrupt, incompetent, or otherwise unfit for the job. In other words, people always vote according to their values. So what makes this election any different? Why are we suddenly saying that it was values that swung this particular decision, as if they’ve played no part in previous elections, and what does it mean to have one side saying that the other lost because they are “out of touch with the moral values of the majority?”

Like the “John Kerry sucks” meme and the talk of a Republican mandate, I think this issue has been misrepresented and blown out of proportion, and I think it’s been done — by some — for political reasons. It’s been done to reinforce a sense of defeat and marginalization in those on the losing side. It’s been done to make liberals feel like they don’t belong and have no cause for hope. It’s a classic demoralizing tactic. And the thing that really upsets me is that it seems to have worked.

We’ve been told that a minority of urbanized, secular, coastal-dwelling intellectuals do not share the same values as the majority of church-going, rural, midwestern working folks, and a lot of people on both sides of the Great Cultural Divide have accepted this analysis without question. Now we’re all nodding like ceramic bobble-head dolls and saying, “Of course! It’s obvious! All those who voted for Candidate X obviously believe Y, which makes them either (a) stupid, or (b) eeeee-vil, and either way, they’re certainly not people I can identify with, talk to, or even share a restaurant with.”

I myself spent a couple of days after the election feeling like that, feeling like the America I believe in isn’t the same one that everyone else seems to want, and maybe it really would be better if I just got the hell out of here and moved to Europe. (Blog-style documentation available here.) I got over feeling that way within a couple of days, but a lot of left-leaning people haven’t, and I’m not sure if they’re going to.

For example, I have a couple of friends who are convinced, based on the outcome of the election, that the bulk of the American population are uneducated, bigoted, dumb-ass, mouth-breathing, Coors-drinking, NASCAR-watching, Bible-thumping, redneck yokels who’d rather spit on a blue-stater than help them change a tire. These friends are seriously depressed by the rhetoric we’ve heard since the election. They feel hated, and they’ve responded by hating right back. One of them is so upset that he says, only half-jokingly, that fighting to save the Union during the Civil War was a mistake, that we should’ve just let the “cousin-fucking Southerners” secede in 1860 so as to spare the rest of us 150 years of aggravation.

I can’t fault my friend for feeling this way. The loudmouth right-wing radio personalities have spent twenty years telling we on the left how much they hate us, how different we are from the “good people,” and we lefties have finally gotten the message. We’ve internalized it and we believe it as much as the Ditto-heads do. We’ve turned it around, of course, and made the other side into the bad guys, but we believe in the vast divide just as much Rush Limbaugh does. Except you know what? I think the vast divide is bullshit.

I’m not playing Pollyanna here. I know there are very real differences in how conservatives and liberals see the world, especially on issues that happen to intersect with religion. I know there are people on both sides that despise everything the other side stands for. But I also know this: most Americans, Democrat and Republican, have far more in common than we do separating us. As I’ve written about before, those stupid red state-blue state maps completely misrepresent the composition of the country; the truth is no state, no county even, is completely homogenous. Democrats and Republicans live together as neighbors, often as friends, even more frequently as families, all over this nation of ours that is supposedly so divided. My home state of Utah is the reddest in the Union; some 73% of the votes cast here went to President Bush. But that means that 27% voted for some other guy. Even here in Mormon-dominated, right-wing Utah, there are liberal voices — and they don’t all live in the hippie/goth enclave of Sugarhouse, either.

I am convinced that everyone, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, all want essentially the same things from life. We want good jobs and a decent place to live. We work hard and strive to be good people, for the most part. We want some measure of success, some sense of satisfaction from however we spend our energies. We love our parents, siblings, spouses, and children. We hope our kids will grow up to be happy and manage not to make the mistakes their parents did. We all have dreams and aspirations and fears and hopes, and we all, ultimately, want what’s best for our neighbors and our nation.

Where we differ is in the details. It is because of details that one group of people says another group is immoral. And that’s really what it means when someone says that Democrats are “out of touch with moral values.” They’re saying — or at least implying — that Republicans have moral values and Democrats do not. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty damn insulting. It’s also untrue. Despite what the Hannitys and the Coulters and the Limbaughs keep saying, lefties are no more moral or immoral than righties. The other side of the fence is quick to point out all the sins of the left: promiscuity, permissiveness, and a tendency to try and avoid accountability. Bill Clinton’s failings unfortunately made it far easier for those charges to stick, but right-wingers seem to forget that Clinton is but one man in a party of millions. They also seem to turn a blind eye to the failings of their own. While liberal sins tend to be matters of the flesh, conservatives have real problems with greed, unethical business practices, and indifference to the suffering of their neighbors. Which sin is greater, and which party is more Christ-like? Who angered Jesus more, prostitutes or money-lenders?

I don’t wish to offend anyone with that line of thinking, and I’m don’t want to go off on any kind of scriptural tangent. I just want to make the point that it is unwise for Republicans to start throwing stones when it comes to moral superiority. Democrats can (and should) respond with our own list of conservative transgressions.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan recently examined a few statistics and came up with some interesting findings. Among other things, he pointed out that, despite all the conservative speeches about the sanctity of marriage, “the states with the highest divorce rates in the U.S. are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. And the states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Every single one of the high divorce rate states went for Bush. Every single one of the low divorce rate states went for Kerry. The Bible Belt divorce rate, in fact, is roughly 50 percent higher than the national average.”

Sullivan also addressed the touchiest of American hot-button issues, abortion, by comparing American numbers to those of Holland, which he calls, “the epitome of socially liberal, relativist liberalism. So which country has the highest rate of abortion? It’s not even close. America has an abortion rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. Holland has a rate of 6.8. Americans, in other words, have three times as many abortions as the Dutch.” He concludes this particular line of reason by asking his readers to, “remind [him] again: which country is the most socially conservative?”

Unfortunately, people don’t often hear that kind of talk. They certainly didn’t hear it during this election cycle. What they heard was a whole lot of innuendo and suggestion, and even some flat-out untruths. They heard, for example, that Democrats are a bunch of non-believers who look down upon those who attend church. They heard that Democrats would strip God from public life, allow abortions right up to the final days before delivery, and force gay marriage down the throats of those who find that thought utterly repulsive. All of which is a gross mispresentation of actual Democratic positions, but, as usual, the Dems did a lousy job of countering the Republican attacks, and so they stuck. And festered. And at least some of the handful of voters who were up for grabs were swayed.

Since I’ve brought it up, let’s go ahead and talk about the elephant in the room, the gay marriage issue. To be sure, the thought of homosexual unions is immensely disturbing to a whole lot of people in this country. You can argue over whether this distaste is justifiable or not, but there’s no denying that it does exist. One also cannot deny that Republicans played on the distaste of those who are uncomfortable with homosexuals, stirring up a hurricane-sized media vortex that sucked air away from other, more important issues. I think this one issue claimed so much attention, in fact, that this is what people are really referring to when they use the imprecise and colorless term “moral values” in reference to Election ’04. They’re not talking about values like love of family, love of country, honor, or responsibility. They’re talking about where you stand on the issue of gay marriage. And if this is the only criterion you’re using to define “moral values,” then it really would appear that liberals — whose basic philosophy is “live and let live” — are indeed out of touch with the majority of Americans.

Except… I must point out yet again that a huge number of Americans didn’t vote, and, of those who did, the majority was determined by a very slim margin. I’m willing to bet that among those who went Republican, particularly the swing voters who don’t pledge any particular party allegience, only some of those people gave a fig one way or the other about gay marriage. In other words, I don’t think the moral values issue was as big a factor as the religious extremists and other demagogues are trying to tell us it was. As I said earlier, I believe Democrats lost individual races based on a mosaic of different factors, of which the “moral values”/gay marriage issue was only one element. (For the record, I think gerrymandering played a far greater role in Republican dominance at the polls, and I know that the failure of Democrats to be convincingly tough on national security played a huge role.)

As usual when I’m talking politics, I’ve gotten pretty long-winded, and I apologize for that to anyone who may still be with me at this point. As I said at the beginning, I’ve really struggled to wrap my head around this whole moral-values thing, and I’m still not sure I’ve addressed it completely. My bottom-line thesis here is that Democrats are not morally inferior to the GOP, and I don’t believe they’re all that out-of-touch with mainstream Americans either. (Roughly half of all mainstream Americans are Democrats, after all.) Any commentator who says otherwise is full of crap, or is deliberately ignoring pieces of the equation. But Dems do have some PR problems, and we do differ from our opponents on some issues. Those differences unfortunately were exploited to great effect by the Republicans.

I also don’t believe that liberals are destined to be, in the words of one conservative, a “permanent minority.” Despite the smug fantasies currently being spun by a lot of the blathering class, conservative ascendency is not inevitable and it is not permanent. (I also think it’s not healthy for the country, at least in its current form, but that’s another post.) Democrats could have been — and must become — more convincing that their positions are good for everyone, not just a handful of “elites.” But in order to get that message across, the party has got to make some long-overdue changes in how it does business and how it presents itself to the public. I’ll discuss my thoughts on how to do that in the next entry.