PLURALISTICISM

More on reacquainting ourselves with pluralism in America in a non-hysterical way:

Joe Katzman's got a typically wide-ranging roundup of good post-election essays from both sides of the spectrum and some commentary of his own:

If this elections results in a strong Democratic Party that fights fiercely on domestic issues and can be trusted on security issues, it will be a big turning point from America. If it fosters some soul-searching on the Republican side along with the willingness to move forward on key issues, that would make me even happier.

Gary Jones has a typically thoughtful post on the reality of pluralism and the decline of statist political philosophies:

Though I'm not religious, 3rd generation red diaper and all that, I admire their work and even help them. They don't care what I believe, they care what I do. We have similar social values but wildly divergent personal values. That's OK because you don't have to love your neighbor or even like them, but you do have to be neighborly, lend a hand like everyone else on tasks that can only be accomplished by joint effort and that are necessary for the thrival of all. It's the modern equivalent of a barn raising or water management. You roll up your sleeves and work with your neighbor. You share meals and behave well while doing projects and what you do when you go home is your concern. Though there are different communities of mind they have significant overlap.

So, I'm OK with all this and I expect the trends to continue and expand because the statists continue to lose, prompting them to think about the consequences of centralization when they are in the minority on a national basis. The old fashioned statists still haven't grasped the significance of networked information and computing technologies. They see it as a different delivery mechanism for broadcast of official information, one that is cheaper and more ubiquitous. This is true but even more importantly it greatly increases the power of networked, peer-to-peer communication and so increases the ability of non-statist groups to prosper.

Via Gary's post, Mindles Dreck of Asymmetrical Information has typically cogent thoughts on a roundup of typically unbalanced thoughts from culture war agitators:

Checking the election results, I see that even here in the non-evangelist, non- 'cracker' tri-state area, Bush won 45% in Connecticut, 46% in New Jersey and 40% in new York. You would never know it from most of this commentary.

It is a laudable impulse to try to increase your understanding of voters in other parts of the country. But you could start by looking around your office or neighborhood and locating a Bush voter - just find the Bush bumper sticker in the parking lot, or seek out the woman at the party who keeps her mouth shut when everyone else rants about 'idiot Bush'. Put your toe in the water.

To these and the millions of other intelligent words on this subject that are circulating in the public sphere, let me just add two points:

• As I began to express in the comments to this earlier post (in reaction to comments from my old school chum Danny Morris), I believe that attitudes towards gay marriage and other conservative 'moral values' issues are more generational than geographical, and I'm sure I've read statistics to back me up on this (holler at me if you have some).  Over time, as the older and less accepting among us die off and more flexible, younger people that have grown up in a much more pluralistic and permissive culture (they DO get MTV in the red states, you know) will continue to increase the acceptance of 'progressive' 'moral values' - or at least work towards more acceptable compromises with the social avant garde.  It's not that the red states, and America as a whole, will become less religious, but we have every reason to expect that the social and political expression of religion will continue to change with the rest of the culture. 

• With the rise of the internet and the general proliferation of more and more points of view which are accessed more and more easily, along with the sea changes to our national and international political life that have been occuring since the end of the Cold War, along with the even more radical changes new technologies will create in our socio-political infrastructure, political identity is becoming more, not less fluid.  Enormous numbers of lifelong Democrats voted Republican this year, and vice versa, and these kinds of party ID switches will continue to become more, not less, common. 

The moral of the story?  Don't listen to Eric Alterman and other sore losers on the left that are effectively calling for a retreat into a big fortified blue bunker-bubble to get ready for all-out culture war.  It's not only needlessly hateful and divisive, it's socially retarded and politically shortsighted.