Since President Bush won his second term, there has been a lot of talk about healing our polarized electorate, bridging the partisan divide and making a truce in the culture wars.
Hey, I'm all for it.
But don't expect anything of that sort to happen. John Kerry did the right thing by giving an eloquent concession speech in which he implored Americans along the lines of Rodney King's old message, "Can't we all just get along?"
But when Bush, Cheney and their lot speak of uniting the nation, they are just giving lip service to the losers. A good politician knows not to kick his opponents while they're down. And if he's nothing else, Bush is a good politician. In some ways he's as slick and Teflon-coated as former President Clinton, though he would bristle with his famous righteous indignation at such a comparison.
Of course, Bush and company can afford to be magnanimous for a little while: They won. So they're promising to bring the country together, even though the strategy of the campaign -- indeed the strategy of every campaign Bush has waged -- has been to divide.
Look not only at the disgusting, false accusations organizations campaigning for Bush brought against Kerry's war record, but also at the outrageous claims similar organizations made against John McCain's war record in 2000. Bush's people even used strategical bigotry against Gov. Anne Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial race.
In that campaign they spread rumors that she had gays and lesbians in her cabinet. How do Bush and his campaigners and supporters live with these methods? Easy. To them, nothing is more important than winning, and winning justifies everything.
It helps that some Americans mindlessly lap up whatever is scraped into their bowls. There are a lot of dumb people and a lot of bigoted people in this country. In fact, dumbness and bigotry go hand and hand. The worst thing about dumb people is that most of them aren't born dumb. They have innate intelligence that they simply don't use. They choose to be dumb, and they're happy with it.
There is evidence of this choice. Here's one bit: I delivered pizza the night of the second presidential debate, and I listened to the debate on my car radio. But many of the houses I delivered pizza to were not tuned to the debate. At least one family was watching a NASCAR race.
So much for being informed.
The unfortunate reality is that Americans have gotten dumber in recent years. What else could explain a national backlash against "the elite" and "intellectuals?" Not too long ago, we had another name that described these people. They were called "educated."
And being an educated critical thinker was not disdained or ostracized. We encouraged it as the foundation of a democracy and a free-market society. As citizens we collectively aspired to it. Now many Americans castigate the educated as atheist and pretentious.
A similar backlash against intellectuals and critical thinkers occurred in two other societies: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Those backlashes started subtly enough, but we all know how insidiously they progressed to their logical conclusions. We don't want to head down that path.
Divisiveness will keep us on that course -- a path of neighbor demonizing neighbor-- the same path that led ordinary, otherwise sane Germans to rise up against their Jewish neighbors simply because the powers that be told them their neighbors were different and different was dangerous.
Different is dangerous is the message Bush has always spewed, whether he is enflaming the culture wars by pitting people of differing values against one another or turning out voters against homosexuals.
Bush may talk about uniting, he may even genuinely desire uniting. But at the heart the man is, and always will be, a divider.
Michael Green is pursuing dual graduate degrees in creative writing and film and media studies. Reach him at michael.b.green@asu.edu.
