COMMENTARY
Kinsley: My side lost. Now when can we stop paying penance?
Michael Kinsley, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Sunday, November 14, 2004

The election campaign made it official. These are the Disunited States. There is "red America": conservative, Republican, religious. And there is "blue America": liberal, Democratic, secular. Everybody's message from the election results is that red America won, and blue America must change or die.

It's a terrible exaggeration, of course. People have different mixes of values, and states have different mixes of people. More than 50 million, or 44 percent, of the 115 million citizens who voted for either George W. Bush or John F. Kerry last week live in states that went for the other guy. These misfits go out in public, mingle with others and often are treated like normal human beings.

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At the moment, though, one side of the great divide is being called on for something closer to abjection than mere reconciliation.

So yes, OK, fine. I'm a terrible person — barely a person at all, really, and certainly not a real American — because I voted for the losing candidate. If you insist — and you do — I will rethink my basic beliefs from scratch because they are shared by only 47 percent of the electorate.

And please let me, or any other liberal, know if there is anything else we can do to abase ourselves. Abandon our core values? Pander to yours? Not a problem. Happy to do it. Anything to stop this shower of helpful advice.

I mean, look at it this way. (If you don't mind, that is.) It's true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I'm sure they are — don't involve any direct imposition on you. We don't want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

We on my side of the great divide don't, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don't claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?

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But be fair! (A liberal whine, I know. Sorry.) Conservatives shouldn't assert the prerogatives of victory and then claim the compensations of defeat as well. You can't oppress us and simultaneously complain that we are oppressing you.

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