Wednesday morning at Brown, sleep-deprived students grappled with the shock of Tuesday's Republican victory. But in talking to my fellow students, I was struck by the failure of that shock to prompt any new questions. My fellow Democrats at Brown were talking of provisional and oversees absentee ballots, clinging to the hope that they might be able to swing this election on a technicality.
But this is not 2000, and Ohio is not Florida. What is clear, especially now that Kerry has conceded, is that this election did not hang on paper chads - Bush won by a large margin of the popular vote and as of this writing, will carry the electoral college 286 to 252.
Instead of attributing this loss to the errors made by the Kerry campaign in certain states or the structure of voting procedures, perhaps we should open our eyes to the possibility that Americans simply did not like John Kerry and what he and his party had to say. Maybe America today is just a fundamentally conservative country where liberal values, as articulated by Democrats, no longer resonate.
I have always assumed that liberals, especially liberals like John Kerry (whose blue-blood background and perceived arrogance render him difficult for voters to connect to) will have a hard time playing in the heartland - that thesis is an old political record. But I, like most Democrats, have also assumed that this was a problem of tone, something clever campaigning could overcome, by giving Democrats the "just-folks" accessibility achieved by Republicans.
As I sat glued to CNN in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, it became clear that it's a much deeper issue. The crucial state, Ohio, was one where Kerry's policies should have played well, especially on jobs and the economy. But Ohio is also a state that is starkly conservative on social issues like gun control, abortion and gay marriage. Ohio, and consequently this election, was lost on values. Are the values of the Democratic Party irrevocably out of sync with the values of Americans?
CNN's commentators seemed to think so. Tucker Carlson of "Crossfire," though far from my favorite pundit, made a good point in equating what is happening to the Democratic Party now to what happened to Republicans after Barry Goldwater's loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Goldwater was a radical conservative who opposed President Eisenhower's use of troops in Little Rock, Ark., and considered the Republican platform of his time "dime-store New Deal." His loss challenged Republicans to re-evaluate their identity and to reconstitute their ideology without completely relinquishing their principles. As Carlson explained, they spent a generation "writing books and going to think tanks" and came back strong with conservatism as we have it today.
As painful as it might be, it might be just what we need. When Kerry's loss is coupled with the Republican gains in the Senate and the House (even taking down Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle), it becomes clear that liberalism's position in America is tenuous at best.
In fact, this identity crisis of the left is a global phenomenon. In Europe, where the populace has grown increasingly conservative, Social Democrats like Germany's Gerhard Schroeder and England's Tony Blair have had to embrace a number of conservative ideas to survive. But they still face significant difficulties resonating with voters, because they have failed to address the underlying ideological issue. In the long run, re-formulating might be a wiser choice than covering it up with folksy rhetoric for the short term.
Some might argue that we did this with President Bill Clinton, the New Democrat, in the 1990s. but his success had more to do with his personal charisma, and the party at large does not seem to have caught on.
Brown is an undeniably liberal school; its students are the next generation of liberal leaders. We have the privilege of spending four years where our only responsibility is to think - who better then to come up with a new liberalism than us? Perhaps if we spend less time wallowing in the minutiae of what went wrong on Tuesday and more time figuring out what to do right for the next 20 years, the left can become once again a viable force in America.
Maha Atal '08 looks fabulous in a bowtie.
