Long faces here in Berkeley this morning. I spent last night, after getting out of rehearsal, at Mike’s place watching the returns and trying to play the new edition of Axis and Allies. At that point the race had narrowed to Ohio, with Bush leading by over 100,000 votes, a deficit that Kerry never even started to close, not even when precincts from the big cities came in.

Let me admit up front that the result was disappointing to me: I voted for Kerry, and even though I had to hold my nose to do so, I felt that if this particular administration wasn’t replaced, dangerous precedents would be set for politics in America for decades to come. Never before have policy and politics been so confused. Republicans have managed to paint people who disagree with their policies as unpatriotic and terrorist sympathizers, and they’ve used nearly every department and office under their control to further tighten their hold on the electorate. Like I said, there’s a lot about the Democrats I don’t like, but democracy is meaningless without a loyal, but significant, opposition.

That said, I’m actually more shocked than disappointed, and I’m not just talking about the difference between the exit polls and the actual numbers. Granted, we here in the San Francisco area don’t exactly have our fingers on the pulse of the nation. But I really thought Kerry was going to do better. Bush had so much going against him: continual disaster in Iraq, a crippled economy, growing class disparity, and a debate performance that would have made a ninth-grade Mock UN participant blush. In spite of everything he pulled it off, and quite handily.

There will be a lot of blame cast about by the Democrats and probably the Republicans too (public failure, unlike misery, gets company whether it wants it or not). Democrats tend to blame their candidates: Kerry was too liberal, too uptight, too upper-class, too Massachusetts, and anyway, senators never win presidential elections. All of these complaints are true, and probably significant. But such superficial analyses, in my opinion, miss the point. Neither Kerry nor Bush dropped out of the sky, and what’s more, neither the “Bush” nor the “Kerry” we saw all too much of bear all that much resemblance to the George W. Bush and John F. Kerry who were probably wishing more often than not that they could be at home with a beer watching a baseball game. The candidates were and are creations of their parties. Chosen, trained, harnessed, controlled, and spun.

The surprise of this election, thus, is not that an over-indulged scion of the Bush family who affects a Texas accent beat an overly articulate, naturally reclusive policy wonk, but rather that where the Democrats were barely able to hold together on the basis of their hatred for George Bush, the Republicans have been able not only to unite, but to organize their coalition, from the neo-cons to the small-government types to the religious conservatives. It’s important to remember that two-party politics in America means that a lot of people who naturally would disagree on a whole host of issues have to behave like a single unit. The party that can do this wins, and if the previous two elections didn’t make this clear, 2004 ought to be manifest proof that the Republicans have figured out how to do this. Their star is in the ascendant, and they will run this country until hubris brings them down or someone else comes up with a better ideology.

Much earlier in this horrendously long election season I suggested that the Republican machine might be cracking apart at the seams. Big business and religious conservatism often run at cross purposes, and I have entertained some hopes that if Christians were to start focusing a little bit more on loving their neighbors and being personally virtuous, they would eventually become disgusted with the unbridled greed that animates corporate culture. But I neglected, I fear, to take sufficient account of the issue of abortion. After thirty-odd years it remains as divisive as ever, in spite of the fact that it is generally considered polite not to talk about it. But for a very significant majority of Americans abortion is not just an issue, but a nonnegotiable one. Conservative Christians have become convinced, as they have never been by any other president, that George Bush will actively work to overturn Roe v. Wade. Kerry probably sold many of them on Iraq, the economy, and health care, but when push came to shove they pulled the lever for Bush.

This sort of fanatical insistence on a single issue undoubtedly confuses 48% of the voters in America and close to 90% of Europeans. It confuses them because they see abortion as an isolated issue, or perhaps as a manifestation of the tendency for religious fundamentalists to want to control other people’s behavior through the law. They wonder why opposition to abortion is not in the same class as opposition to the death penalty, or nuclear proliferation, or drilling in the Artic Wildlife Preserve, why there is no give and take. Here is why: with articles of faith there can be no calculus of values. There can be no compromise taken, no quarter given, no balance sought. Faith encompasses a network of beliefs that are inseparable, and if you try to remove some element the whole structure changes.

What do I mean by faith? I want to disambiguate my use of the word from the theological definition – but only a little. T.S. Eliot said that for most people culture is indistinguishable from religion. That is, both culture and religion depend on a unified structure of living artifacts: language, mythology, and art (to name a few). Culture is not merely a set of precepts, dogmas, or facts, but a way of looking at the world. Or as the Germans say, Weltanschaung. Faith is the faculty that permits a person to belong to a culture or to a religion, to perceive it as a whole and not as disconnected gestures. Without faith – which, tellingly, according to Christian theology you must receive before you can exercise it – you are stuck on the outside, unable to see why one thing is connected to another. You are forced to assemble your own existence from scratch, to pick and choose beliefs and values. In other words, the plight of modern man.

Alas, there is not enough space, or organization, in this essay to discuss the plight of modern man. There are many stories of his birth, a great many rumors of his death, and all too many epitaphs to really know what he was like. We are, we have to admit, much in the dark about him. We’re not quite sure what he heard in his music, why he fought all those wars, why he was so patriarchal and rationalist by turns and at other times so touchingly kind to children. Something happened during the two world wars, and the few people left who lived through them won’t talk. So we read books and poems from that time. There’s a lot of talk about the hollow men, the waste land, the twilight of the gods, the decline of the West. All very sad, but like a stranger’s funeral. Only, when we ask ourselves what we’re doing here, why we should bother, all we hear is the dull murmur of a hundred voices coming from another room.

Those of us born in the later parts of the twentieth century have been living in a historical interregnum. Without an overarching culture to give us meaning and context, we are reduced to individuals, each trying to answer questions of meaning on his own. As Spengler (the columnist for the Asia Times, not to be confused with the German philosopher Oswald Spengler, though the columnist certainly takes after his namesake) points out, in the absence of the faith given us by culture, the human instinct is for suicide, which is why Europe is collapsing demographically.

Why is this relevant to the 2004 election and the rise of the Republicans? Because even though the high culture of Western Europe is dying out, the instruments of power it fashioned are still in existence. America retains its military superiority, and much more importantly, the mechanisms of capitalism continue to operate. The power of these instruments is an irresistable temptation. At the same time, new cultures are coming into existence (you can find them by the cries of babies, or the sound of prayers). And those who want power will jump like rats from a sinking ship to cling to youth and vitality.

Watch closely: the shape of the world is being determined.