Characteristically, Norman Geras gets straight to the heart of the problem with a lot of the left-liberal reaction to George Bush's re-election - and all this without a moment's indulgence in the sort of Votenfreude some of his esteemed co-bloggers haven't been able to resist. It's worth pointing out, since a dismayingly large number of people are incapable of seeing it, that everything Norm says is compatible with having wished, as I in fact wished, for a Kerry victory on Tuesday. The two key paragraphs are these:
On the Guardian's Comment page Mike Marqusee went so far as to deny that George Bush now has a mandate. He doesn't apparently, because he 'does not speak for, or enjoy... the confidence of[,] half the population'. Yes, I'd like to see that principle consistently applied across the electoral systems of the world. Marqusee was echoed by Simon Tisdall who carefully pointed out that '48% of voters rejected [Bush]' - as if you might have missed the other side of the story. Even in those columns of the newspaper where it was conceded that Bush does now (after Tuesday) have a mandate, or that he can now 'claim' a legitimacy he did not have before, the implication was - if you take head-on what these writers were deftly suggesting to you - that, before Tuesday, Bush might only have been President unconstitutionally. This is, in a word, false.
In contemporary debate on the liberal-left, it is sometimes suggested that, only with a few crazies, only at the very outside margin of this political sector, is there any serious problem about the commitment to democratic values. I'd like to think that that is indeed true. But developments since September 11 2001, and in particular the Iraq war and the pent-up animosities towards the two leaders most closely associated with it, have now knocked so many people so far off balance that they no longer know, can no longer see, what they are saying much of the time - and they come from a far wider segment of the liberal-left than just the extreme margins.