November 3, 2004

The Presidential election is over for all practical purposes. Although spin doctors and lawyers will quibble and obfuscate, the essence of the news is not so much that Bush won, but how big he won. Whatever shaving is done on the margins it must now be accepted that the old order is dead. Neither the 60s nor vaudeville are coming back. Overlooked in the obsession with Presidential electoral votes was the passage in 11 out of 11 states of the Gay Marriage Ban. The Guardian reports:

In a resounding, coast-to-coast rejection of gay marriage, voters in 11 states approved constitutional amendments Tuesday limiting marriage to one man and one woman. The amendments won, often by huge margins, in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Utah and Oregon - the one state where gay-rights activists hoped to prevail. The bans won by a 3-to-1 margin in Kentucky, Georgia and Arkansas, 3-to-2 in Ohio, and 6-to-1 in Mississippi.

This is not the place to discuss the subject of homosexual marriage, but this result together with everything else, if does not suggest something definite, unmistakably hints the atmosphere has changed forever. The Left cannot now attempt to reassemble the pieces of their old platforms, hoping that a little tweaking and repackaging here and there will once again make them competitive. It's the platform itself that has rotted and fallen to pieces. The times, they are a' changing.

Thoughtful people within the Liberal establishment must now accept, or at least seriously consider the possibility that:

• the world is indeed facing a new fascist threat in the shape of radical Islam. It is not imaginary;
• chaos and disorder are threatening to engulf large parts of the Third World and international institutions, like the World Bank and the UN have proved incapable to deal with it; and
• the populations of Europe and America, or America at least, retain certain core beliefs -- never mind what these are for the present -- which are absolutely nonnegotiable and which will not be surrendered under any circumstances.

On this basis all men of goodwill can work together to build a 21st century society that will face the new aggressors; use the power of the markets and technology to bring material prosperity to the billions of impoverished people in the Third World; and acknowledge that we, like all our ancestors from the day we first learned to bury our dead under a cairn of stones are still entitled to ask the eternal questions. That we desire, not to be New Soviet or Post-modern Men, but simply Men, as ever we were.