A reader writes:
You come back to Obama as an American. That squarely hits the target. In fact, I think the major political question for America in the wake of this election is whether the conservative bubble world is capable of coming to grips with this reality. Will the bubble be shattered? Probably not. That will require a process, not a single event. But it has been penetrated a few times last night–that meltdown on Fox involving Karl Rove was the clearest demonstration. Suddenly the curtain was pulled back and the man pulling the strings was revealed. Many on the inside must now start to question this alternate reality they have built for themselves.
Your post gets to the core political, philosophical and theological issue in play–what is American? The right reflexively defines "American" through self-reference. Any "other" cannot be American.
Indeed that presents their own point of fragility as Southern Evangelicals, conservative Catholics and Mormons may come together for some political purposes, but have a deep-rooted rejection of each other as "legitimate" Americans. But what is "American" can only be defined in reference to the totality of the country–and the country is not only much less white, male, socially conservative and Bible-thumping than they are, it is in the grips of a dynamic process in which their stake is steadily and even dramatically shrinking. Barack Obama and the Democrats have fully embraced this dynamic.
In one of his scientific works, Goethe writes that "only the totality of humankind can be taken as a point of reference for describing what is human." On this point, he identifies the fundamental error of the "natural law" philosophy of the Robert P. George school, as well as your typical Southern Baptist fire breather and the Mormon theo-politician. They have a vision of what is "natural" which takes as its reference point only a fragment of humanity, rejecting much of the balance, and which therefore engages in morally unconscionable and scientifically fallacious reasoning. But America has passed the tipping point–their model of what is "America" no longer constitutes a plausible plurality of America (even when stretched through the use of money and voter suppression tricks).
We are entering a new world. Can the Republicans grapple with that reality?
The Dish 