No, it wasn't God [Rare insightful commentary by a British lefty]

The Republicans won because they had a very clear idea of what they stood for. The Democrats did not

In the days before ubiquitous pornography - so the story has it - adolescents used to get their stimulation from magazines such as National Geographic. There, among the pictures of life on the pack-ice and the flora of Madagascar, would be colour photographs of tribeswomen with bare breasts or bare bums. These interesting features were regarded by the adult world as being somehow far less offensive - less breasty, less bumful, if you like - than they would have been if attached to a European woman.

The same now seems to be true for the relationship between politics and religion. The ayatollah Sistani, representing the Shia of Iraq, is a venerable figure of considerable wisdom; the Reverend Jesse Jackson is all the better for being a man of God. All those lovely gospel choirs! All those Hallelujahs! But the appearance of any (mainly) white religiosity either in America or here sets off an alarm system as clamorous as would have sounded at, say, the appearance of a topless Princess Alexandra in a 1937 travel mag. What can be allowed, happily to those of a different (now, how shall we put this?) culture is the beginning of the end if any of our own lot show similar pious tendencies.

I much prefer secularism to theocracy. But the thing is, so do the Americans and nothing about this last election indicates otherwise, as I hope to prove. Yet a new conventional wisdom has sprung up almost instantaneously (a wisdom which describes two Americas - one irrational and priest-bound, the other open and rational) locked in a Pullmanesque contest that has just been won by the 'battalions of Christian soldiers' (as one of our most eminent historians put it).

'We ran a jihad in America,' wrote one celebrated American columnist. 'The faithful were shepherded to the polls as though to the rapture,' said another, conjuring an image entirely absent from any coverage that I saw at the time. The key statistic, quoted by just about everybody, was the one showing that the number one issue among voters was not the economy, was not Iraq, but something called 'moral values'.

This finding chimed with the thesis of a recent, well-received book by Thomas Frank, which argued that poor Americans were gulled by rich Americans via religion and prejudice into voting for a rapacious capitalism that was inimical to their real interests. In other words, they were ideologically drugged. We wuz robbed again, not this time by voting irregularities, but by the mobilisation of the gullible (or the 'dumb' as the Daily Mirror , which can claim some expertise in this area, had it) by the unscrupulous. The dismay of some liberal Democrats, and the increase in traffic at the Canadian immigration website at the result led one cyberwit to mock up pictures of New York professionals struggling across the snowy border, dragging their Vuitton behind them.

But scrutiny of the figures shows these fears to be misplaced. For a start, we should remind ourselves that, though President Bush won a clear victory, it was still a close one. The Democrats actually did rather better than I'd expected following the Republican convention. Not only that, but far from there being two separate nations growing apart, some of the voting trends actually emphasised the opposite. Many states showed very close results (Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, New Mexico - as well as Ohio), and all of them far closer than what happens in what we in Britain call a 'safe seat', where the winning party often manages more than 60 per cent of the vote.

True, large cities showed up for Kerry and rural areas for Bush, but small cities were absolutely evenly split, with Bush shading the suburbs. More urban dwellers, Hispanics, blacks, Catholics and Jews voted for Bush than before, and more white women. Forty-five per cent of Bush's vote came from voters who classified themselves as 'moderate' or 'liberal'.

So what about the religious? The populist 'uprising' from the red states noted by Thomas Frank turns out, on inspection, to be more or a less a mirage, a self-inflicted liberal nightmare. Twenty-two per cent placed 'moral values' as the number one voting issue, of whom four- fifths voted for Bush, making around 17 per cent of those voting. Eighty-three per cent of voters did not fall into this camp at all.

Furthermore, the percentage of voters describing themselves as evangelical was the same as in 2000. The proportions in favour or against abortion were no different - 55 per cent are broadly in favour of abortion with 42 per cent opposed. A majority supported either gay marriage (which we do not have here in Britain, or in most countries in Europe) or of gay civil unions. In fact, among these latter, there was a 5 per cent lead for Bush. (Equally unexpectedly, those most scared by terrorism actually voted for Kerry.)

It is when you look at some of the usual key indicators to election victory that you find the better explanation of 2 November. People who had experienced job loss were far more likely to vote for Kerry; those who hadn't - and there were more of them - would go for Bush. More people felt that the Bush years had either improved their financial position, or maintained it, than believed that they had been damaged.

This analysis matters so much, partly because the solutions being urged upon the battered Democrats depend upon getting it right, and partly because the rest of the world needs to know how to interpret America. For example, some people are now urging an accommodation with 'spiritual politics' in the shape of conceding on gay marriage and partial birth abortion.

The problem with this is obvious. We can all be against late abortion - and none more so than the woman who feels the child kicking inside her - but the best way to reduce the number of such terminations is through earlier abortions, earlier diagnosis of serious handicap, better contraception and better education. To ban them is simply to make them more dangerous, because women will seek - whatever we think about it - to control their own situations.

You can frame this as the progressive's answer to late abortion. You can be sensitive to the objections, try to understand why the sudden eruption of gay marriage has caused such offence, while arguing your case. To be forced to argue your case is not a symptom of incipient clerical fascism, but of a respect for the views of others. And you don't have to be Elmer Gantry to wonder how desirable it is to have (as happened to me yesterday) a computer search for articles on the Stalin show-trials interrupted by a pop-up depicting women with sperm on their faces.

Above all, however, if you don't want the Republicans to win, then you have to offer something better. In Friday's New York Times, Kerry speechwriter, Andrei Cherny, wrote: 'The overarching problem Democrats have today is the lack of a clear sense of what the party stands for.' These were the questions Kerry needed to answer, he said: 'What is our economic vision in a globalised world? How do we respond to the desire of many Americans to have choices and decision-making power of their own? How can we speak to Americans' moral and spiritual yearnings? How can our national security vision be broader than just a critique of Republican foreign policy?'

Over 40 years, since their defeat in the 1964 presidential election, the Republicans have been busy discussing policy, setting up foundations, leading the national debate on economics and foreign affairs. Informed by this process, the party - as much an awkward coalition as any other - has associated itself with modernity, optimism and clarity. Challenging that position is the long-term task of America's centre left. It is not just a question for the Democrats, but a question for us in Britain, too. What is our solution to the problem of Iran? Or are we just going to wait to see what the Americans do, and then oppose it?

Above all, however, we must first avoid the one fatal error that so many have fallen into. George W Bush and his voters are not dumb. Those who think so are the really dumb ones.

No, not rare insightful, still doesn't begin to get it. It was the patriotism deficit and the credibility gap. Kerry is an anti-American and a liar. It is utterly unsurprising that he was rejected for president of a country he despises and was just trying to fool.

As for Frank, I knew him in college. His fundamental problem is he still believes 1930s economics and does not understand why the American people do not. Or, rather, he thinks they can only disagree with him because they are stupid and fooled by ideologies.

The article puts his thesis as "a rapacious capitalism that was inimical to their real interests". But the American people rightly have no reason to see capitalism as rapacious or as inimical to their real interests. Capitalism has made the average working man in America the most privileged and comfortable in human history.

This is just one more example of the entire left's anti-Americanism, just in an old left, socialist economics guise rather than a new left, cultural "liberation" guise. The left believes that America is a deeply unjust, awful place, whose basic institutions are abominations. And the American people are simply correct when they regard this as a political fantasy, hyperbole, pure rhetorical bilge.

Capitalism is the most successful economic system in human history precisely for the average working man, and American workers know it. They want work, not to be told they don't have to (as in Europe - the truth is the modern left is not even in favor of the old socialist ideas of about the production of wealth). They do not hate their boss, there is no reason they should. They diligently serve other people and expect decent rewards for doing so, and get them. (The secret of Frank incidentally is that he considers it the height of wit to make lots of money selling books denouncing capitalism as mere rhetoric).

Americans do not hate their fathers either, so new left, feminist crusades against patriarchy are equally hollow. They wish they had them, and their attention and guidance. As a young writer has put it, surveying the devastation leftist ideas have brought to middle American culture, it is nto very convincing to denounce patriarchy to a young woman who has never met her father. The article writer says we can all be against PBA, but in fact Kerry was for it. He suggests earlier abortions as the solution. Joy. When people talk about values as what is wrong, they mean things like this.

The American people do not think their military is a great evil, either. They are not pacifists, they conquered the world and intend to keep it. The human cost of this is not news to them - they paid it - and it is not a matter they are flippant about. But they will never blame their sons for the sacrifices that have made their freedom and prosperity possible. They are instead profoundly grateful, an emotion you will never find anywhere on the modern left.

The American people also respect one another and fully expect to get along. They do not denounce the people as idiots, they do not want to secede from association with each other, they are not more enamoured of France or Canada. They expect free elections however messy to produce sane government, saner than any alternative on offer. They keep the big decisions in their own hands because they rightly do not trust supposed elites to make those decisions any better than they do.

Capitalism is not an evil, it is a basic institution of America that works fine and has made America the success it is. Republican government is not an evil, it is a basic institution of America that works fine and has made America the success it is. The US military is not an evil, it is a basic institution of America that works fine and has made America the success it is. Traditional marriage and family is not an evil, it is a basic institution of America that works fine and has made America the success that it is - and only where it is flouted as an institution will you find real social disfunction, today. America is prosperous, free, and victorious, and the American people do not need anybody else's criticism of what created those successes, which they correctly diagnose as attempts by people who wish them ill, to weaken them.

The left will not be relevant again in national politics in America, until it pledges its allegiance to this republic, and its basic institutions. Crusades against capitalism, democracy, national defense, and family, are political losers in America and always will be. America is an optimist and successful nation that has built the greatest country on the planet out of these things.

It is madness to expect us to be against them, merely because a few effete snobs have sneared at them. Those snobs have never accomplished anything in their lives. We have tamed continents, created and established free government among men, abolished slavery, fed the world, advanced science and human knowledge beyond the dreams of our forefathers, achieved unprecedented prosperity and extended it to the common man, destroyed all the empires and tyrannies of the world, demolished its sick ideologies, and done all of it with the greatest attention to justice and tolerance for the human conscience of any great power in world history. Telling us we are evil benighted rubes is just plain laughable. We've got it all figured out, and you all on the elitist left for all your rhetoric couldn't argue your way out of a traffic ticket.

Beg his pardon but it is God that institutes nations, He brings them into being and He destroys them at will.

There is not one satisfying explanation as to why a bunch of under educated Euro refugee's fleeing the feudal system and religious persecution formed the greatest nation in history. They only way they formed it was by putting God in the forefront of their Constitution and lives. God there for decided to bless those that honor Him.

Now the USofA is responsible for flight, electricity, computer technology, communications, space flight, modern convinces, amazing medical break throughs, and by the U.S.'s God blessed existence able to raise most the rest of the entire world to a growth of knowledge, freedom, and better standards of living. Now it should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that those blessing are leaving us the more the enlightened liberal intellectuals promote secular humanism not only in government but also their demands on the faithful to accept a sinful society instead of a healthy society, with their anything goes base animal behaviour. Their ideas regarding, government, sex, sovereignty are not only insane, but destructive, and also offend God.

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