The Tide has Turned

I realise that haven't posted anything about the American elections. But a few day's pause does give time to assess the impact.

Unlike some anti-American idiots of the left, I have always believed that the majority of the American people, although ill-informed by the corporate-controlled media, and restricted by an hopelessly corrupt and gerrymandered electoral system, are not stupid or evil. And this election represents the moment where the electorate have woken up and smelled the coffee. They've collectively realised that dick-swinging macho posturing is not the same as decisive moral leadership, and is no substitute for competent administration. People have remembered Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina. So George Bush has been thwacked by the clue bat, and not before time. And it's great to see the dismissal of that hubris-filled Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of everything that's gone wrong in Iraq. He's not fit to be a rat catcher in Scunthorpe. I hope he gets investigated for war crimes.

I don't think it's the end of conservatism in America. America is and always has been a small-c conservative nation by European standards; their centre of gravity is several degrees further to the right compared with ours, and we have to recognise and live with that. And I think it's more that the Republicans have lost, rather than the Democrats have won. But then that's true of almost every election where power changes hands.

But it is a major defeat for the so-called 'Conservative Movement', that bastard offspring of Cyrus Scofield and Ayn Rand. As many people have pointed out, it's not really conservative all all, but radical right. And no matter how the wingnuts try to spin it, they've lost big time. Orcinus has some good analysis on this.

All this has left Tony Blair twisting in the wind. It's patently obvious that British foreign policy is being decided in Washington, and our government doesn't actually know what's going to happen next, even though our soldiers (and civilian population) are still very much in the firing line. It was telling to see what people said on BBC1's "Question Time" on Thursday. We had former Labour Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon weaseling, while former Tory Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind launching a blistering attack on the war in Iraq. If a time traveller from the 1980s had watched that programme, his head would probably have exploded as soon as he realised which one was Labour, and which one was the Tory.

It's going to be a very turbulent next two years.