The pointing of fingers has begun. We need to be more like the religous right or we need to ignore them. I don't know the answer but this country has a big problem. I'ts split into two.

  thanks to Angry Bear

There is a book that talks about this divide...

The Great Divide
Retro vs. Metro America

This groundbreaking book explains why our nation is so bitterly divided into what the authors call Retro and Metro America. With hundreds of informative full-color maps, charts, and graphs, dramatic editorial and historical photography, incisive political cartoons and illustrations, this book acts as a blueprint for the reform of the Democratic party.

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Whether the author's solution to rebuilding the Democratic Party makes sense or will work, I don't know. However, they do a very good job of describing the problem. Two Americas at odds with each other. The Civil War continues.

Laura Rozen feels the same way. She quoted from a Tom Friedman editorial and added her agreement...

Tom Friedman on Two Nations:

But what troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do - they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is. Is it a country that does not intrude into people's sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn't trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us - instead of dividing us from one another and from the world? [...] I share Friedman's question. I've talked to a couple of "the wider war" Republicans in the past few days who insist Bush has no intentions to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade because a majority of Americans oppose overturning it. But all the evidence I see from the past two days leads me to wonder how it would be possible to get through the next four years without Roe v. Wade being overturned. Bush owes this election to the Christian evangelicals and that is surely one of their key values. Two nations and under this leader, seeing how we can live together is shrinking. There are those of us who believe in real individual freedoms, and those who believe in imposing their religious beliefs on others.

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Still Missing the Big Picture About This Election

This is not about Republicans or Democrats. This is not about the war. This is not about the economy. This is not even about counting the votes. This is the final step in the 20-year creeping coup by the theocrats, the Dominionists. In the House and the Senate, the theocrats made dramatic advances, far beyond the number of seats that switched parties. On the GOP side, they have replaced moderates with zealots, and have significantly strengthened the support for the main theocrat bills that will be reintroduced in the new Congress. You can hear it in the media's codewords: this election did NOT turn on Iraq or the economy or security, it turned on "moral values", the politically correct code-word for theocratic values, i.e., placing one's religion above the laws of man. Exit polls show that "moral values" were the most common #1 concern among voters, and that among those who marked "moral values" as their primary concern, 80% voted for Bush. Every state that had a same-sex marriage ban up for decision voted the theocrat way. [...] I warned before the election that they were one victory away, and that they would win no matter what the actual vote was, because they are zealots who would do anything to win, including fraud on a massive scale that folks here just don't want to even concieve, because they have never looked radical religious extremism in the face the way I have, having lived in Israel for 13 years in the past. The theocrats will not be stopped, because Americans refuse to believe that it could happen here. It is just like Germany in the 20's---not like McCarthyism in the 50's. This is far worse, but denial is rampant, because we just don't want to believe that our America could fall to Christian Taliban. We've already reached the tipping point. It is only a matter of time, unless people wake up--and I don't think they will, the taboo on confronting the dark side of religion is just too strong here in America. What about Ohio, you say? The judges deciding matters in Ohio, like the two judges that allowed challenges inside the polling places, are theocrats - one was the author of the original draft of the Thornburgh brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe V. Wade, the other was the dissenting voice in cases about 10 Commandment displays on government property. You think it is a coincidence that Ohio is the first place where statewide, the teaching of creationism has been mandated in science class? Wake up, America! Thus, the election is already over, even though I personally think that Kerry won, not only Ohio, but states like Florida, and may even have won the popular vote, so deep is the fraud, led by the electronic voting machines--not just those people actually use to vote, but far more significantly those used to tally the votes, carefully placed in key districts, carefully managed behind the scenes, vote totals manipulated with no way for an audit or verification. But, unless you understand who is actually behind this election victory, you probably dismiss that as hysterical tin-foil paranoia. Surely, you think, the margins in places like Florida are beyond contesting. That is because you still think this is just a struggle between two competing parties in a democracy. That is because you just don't get it. This was a coup.

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Aron sees a parallel with Israel..

In general, I try to keep the focus of this blog on the Israel/Palestine conflict. There are plenty of excellent general lefty blogs around. But I often see parallels in the United States to what went on in Israel. There too, a rise in mystical blood-thirsty fundamentalism, moved Israel away from democratic values. There too, the Labor party decided to become a Likud-lite, instead of sticking to the socialist-progressive values upon which the party was founded. And the more the Labor party pandered to the "center," the less relevant it became. Why vote for Likud-lite if you can vote for the real thing? Post Kerry's defeat there are already voices in the Democratic party that argue that they need to come to terms with evangelical values. There are voices saying the Democrats need to project an even more militaristic image than Kerry did. But I agree with Vijay Prashad in this article. "It is time to throw off our forbearance and open a direct debate on the suppression of rational argument in favor of theocratic bigotry."

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Vijay Prashad's article...

The Election Of Homophobia And Misogyny
It Is Time To Confront Theocratic Bigotry Head On

The Faith-Based initiatives, the ban on "partial-birth" abortions, the position against gay marriage, the refusal to fund stem-cell research, the "crusade" against Islam and Bush's personal story of transformation and forgiveness appealed to a population that is piously fundamentalist. Without meaningful work, with relatives and friends on the battlefield, with more and more corporations in domination over their lives, people who turn to Bush and to Evangelicalism do so for stability and order. As everything falls apart, belief provides organizations and institutions, and ideological stability. Religious organization offers the soul of soulless conditions. Progressives are loath to offer a frontal criticism of the theocracy that has overtaken the South and the Midwest -- where under the command of tolerance we have to endure the intolerance toward women and their bodies, toward gays and lesbians, towards anyone who does not fit the compass of the "moral values" mass-produced by the established churches. It is time to throw off our forbearance and open a direct debate on the suppression of rational argument in favor of theocratic bigotry. Homophobia elected Bush. Misogyny elected Bush. Unreason elected Bush.

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And then there is the fascist element...

Heal this
by David Neiwert

Well, that didn't take long. I figured it was only a matter of time before the conservative façade of civility crumbled, but this time it came off faster than the pancake on a ten-dollar hooker. Bill Bennett, that paragon of moral virtue, was the first to explain that "national healing" is just another word for "culture war": Having restored decency to the White House, President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law. His supporters want that, and have given him a mandate in their popular and electoral votes to see to it. Now is the time to begin our long, national cultural renewal ("The Great Relearning," as novelist Tom Wolfe calls it) -- no less in legislation than in federal court appointments. It is, after all, the main reason George W. Bush was reelected. [...] Just when I got done saying that one of the important things that distinguishes movement conservatism from genuine fascism was the lack of any major push for national renewal and purification … jeez. Well, let's face it: Republicans have a history of taking a peculiar view of bipartisanship anyway. All this talk about comity and national healing and getting along sounds great, but I'm not buying. Not when we just got through a campaign where conservatives were openly wishing death on their opponent and arguing against allowing him to take office, even if he won the election. Not when their fellow conservatives looked on and said nothing.

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Joanna Guldi on the Ugly Morning

The beast of history is in. Lovers in each others’ arms, wake up and look. Poets and anarchists, put down your pens. Stop all the clocks, put down the indy rock music, stop reading psychology. Move to Vancouver or Paris maybe, where it would still be possible to continue thinking that history had not happened. For everything has changed where we live. Get a degree in political science or economics and rejoin the fight in another incarnation. Because whatever we were doing isn’t working, and the deadline is past. If there were a practical way to build something out of what has happened, we’d turn to that, but the moderate conservatives have already been exiled from Washington, and none of our friends will have influence for a long time yet. What has happened is too big for us, too big for our loose ideas of a hundred-year-plan for peace and happiness. There is no more road by which to get there: the storm of the last four years has swept it away, and the wind in the street last night blew out our last bridge to safety. All day long I had been praying, calming myself with old psalms about how the universe was all one, how God had made it, all of its corners and controversies, how providence would follow us all the way through the shadow of darkness. When I woke up this morning the only psalm I could remember was this one: Lord teach my fingers to make battle, and my hands to make war

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Steve Gilliard sees some hope...

To our European friends

So Europeans should not be so quick to condemn Americans for supporting Bush. They didn't do so because they want unending war, although too many believe in a movie version of the world, where John Wayne makes everything right. They did so for purely domestic reasons, economic fear expressed as social outrage. I think Europeans will be surprised at how quickly Americans turn on Bush's war as soon as they realize we are losing. We are not there yet, and the war is unpopular now. It will not grow more popular, especially after the elections either don't happen or fall apart. And it's not as if Kerry could have avoided disaster in Iraq either. Iraq will be our Algeria, but we are not there yet. Unfortunately, we will get there. Remember, before you chide Americans for supporting the war, remember, the Paras almost seized the French government to keep their war going. If the 82nd ABN drops on Washington, it won't be for more war in Iraq. All countries have national bouts of madness and mistakes. Nixon was reelected after Watergate. Earlier I said this was like 1997. I was wrong, this was like the 1992 British elections, except the problem wasn't weak opposition leadership. We've set the stage to realign American politics, if we work at it. We fell short, but just short. I think some Americans will need a sharp slap in the head to understand how flawed Bush is. I think they will need to see why we must be better citizens of the world. Bush played to our selfish and weak side and won. Now we will find out why that was a mistake. Many Americans feel just as cheated and chargrined as you do, but in the end, it came down to a few districts in rural Ohio and they believed in Bush and embraced their fears. Now we all have to live with the results.

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I'm not sure I share Steve's optimism. I'll try but it's not comfortable sharing a country with people who don't believe I should be a citizen of this country because I don't believe in God.