I live in the bruised blue bullseye in the heart of Kansas. If you draw a circle with a three-mile radius centered on the intersection of Broadway and Douglas in downtown Wichita, you'd delimit a solidly Democratic urban area. Few houses in that area were built after 1950, and not many houses beyond that line were built before 1950. Wichita officially leans Republican, thanks to the vast sprawl of annexed suburban sprawl to the east and west, with their gated residential complexes, office parks, strip malls and mega-churches. Most of the business here is conducted around the urban periphery: the aircraft plants were all built in once-open fields, formerly in-town factories like Coleman have moved out of town, as have the office complexes -- most notably the dark fortress that headquarters Koch Industries. Space is one thing Kansas has always had in abundance, so it isn't a big surprise that we waste so much of it. Or more precisely, we throw away what has been used in order to use more.

It turns out that the frontier in America hasn't closed. The new frontier is the fringe of our urban sprawl. People move there, much as they have since the founding of the U.S.A., to build new lives, and to escape from old lives. And they create wealth in the process, in this case converting farmland to roads and offices and stores and modern residential complexes. Nothing differentiates America from the old world more than the sense of living on the frontier. We get much of our identify from the frontier, but what matters most is that we find in the frontier a fountain of wealth. America became the richest nation in the world by mining its resources, and that same tactic continues to work today -- at least for some people -- even when the resource is mere space. The attraction of suburbia may be that it is close enough to the resources of the city but still apart from the city, but the payoff is that it becomes its own self-enclosed, self-selected settlement. The people who move there may have all sorts of motivations: they may fear the city, or see new opportunities, or maybe they just like the feel of living where everything is so new and squeaky clean. But they carry with them the ideology of the frontier, the deepest fount of patriotism in America, and when they move they bond with new neighbors who believe in much the same thing, and as they do so they lose their bonds with their old community, with the city. Between 1960-1966 a little less than half of our close neighbors moved, mostly to the edge of town, mostly for no better reason than they wanted larger houses. (We, and several others who stayed, built on.) Before they moved there was little to mark the movers as being different from the stickers, but after they moved they became different. This process has gone on long enough that there are really three Wichitas: the old town and the sprawls to the east and west.

Similar dynamics occur in most cities in America, with a few significant variations. Cities with very strong centers (New York, Chicago, San Francisco) can continue to thrive without noticing the drain of the suburbs. In other cities the drain is felt but more or less counterbalanced by urban movements, including (but not limited to) gentrification. Wichita has a weak center, so the risk is that the core city will become little more than a low-rent residential area for the suburban dynamos. Even now we have to leave the old town area for movies, most shopping, many restaurants, but Wichita is small enough that's not much of a practical problem. Conversely, there is little reason for the exurbans to ever leave their edge of town. They become ever more isolated, and their isolation has much to do with their drift to the political right.

One of the lessons of the 2004 elections is that the deep divisions within America are not just a matter of political heritage, of race, and of class -- they are reinforced in the physical spaces we inhabit. Living in the bullseye I can safely say that almost none of the people I know and deal with regularly, and very few of my neighbors, fell for George W. Bush. On the other hand, there are vast tracts where the opposite was the case. If the necessary political task is to somehow break through to those people, I'd have to say that the prospects are gloomy. For one thing, the demographic trends work against us. Even so, how can we break through to communicate with them? Communication depends on common language and values, and we have little of either. I may have a slight advantage over your typical concerned New Yorker in that I can see and almost touch their world, but the barrier is still huge, and probably insurmountable -- at least by argument.

One reason Bush won this election is that his world -- not the world he lives in, but the one his people know how to manipulate -- is bigger than we can imagine. That world is not only large; it is isolated from and fortified against our world -- a world we consider to be real because it acknowledges facts, like finite resources and increasing worldwide poverty, that Bush's bubble world denies. For simplicity's sake, let's call this bubble world the Bushwelt -- we might as well admit that Bush has earned the honor. From our point of view, it is obvious that the Bushwelt's days are numbered. We can't predict exactly which catastrophe will hit so severely that it will shake the faithful, but the catastrophes have queued up already, and odds are that there are more that we haven't sized up yet. For one thing, U.S. power to dominate the world is waning -- military power undermined by arrogant overreach and incompetence, and more importantly economic power surrendered to global capital while marginalizing labor and undermining education. Moreover, many resources are finite, and even if there are enough to go around, they can be monopolized and manipulated to create uncomfortable shortages. Bush policies to weaken government and empower capital make us all the more vulnerable to market squeezes -- the health care racket is a good example -- and all the more powerless to correct them, or any other disaster. The latter could come from terrorism or crime, but could just as well come from incompetence. And the wreckless despoiling of the environment raises a number of truly scary worst case scenarios. But four years of Bush rule, which were more than most of us could stand, doesn't seem to have phased Bushwelt at all. Sure, the war on terrorism hasn't gone as well as one might hope, and the economy's hit some rough spots, but they don't blame Bush for that.

Looking at the Bushwelt outside of the Wichita bullseye gives us a bit of relevant data, if not necessarily insight. Wichita's economy took a big immediate hit after 9/11: the biggest industry here is aircraft manufacture, and people just weren't anxious to get onto airplanes at the time. But 9/11 wasn't Bush's fault -- at least that's what most people say, including many who can't stand the man. And the aircraft industry slowly recovered: part due to increased military spending, part because businesses could work around airport hassles by operating their own private planes. The latter happened because the Fed kept interest rates down at record low levels, and because businesses under Bush were able to recover their profit levels faster than workers could improve their wages. The low interest rates were also key to a building boom, which all took place on the fringe of the city. Moreover, people with high mortgages could refinance giving them a boost in net income, while more renters could afford to buy. People who didn't lose their jobs and could take advantage of the low interest rates actually did better during the recession. People with a lot of stocks had some problems, but Bush's tax cuts kept them in line. Consequently, while the core city suffered job losses and givebacks to business, the burbs made out better, and the votes split accordingly.

As for the wars, the American body count that we find so senseless and horrifying is really just a drop in the bucket. There is a big military presence here, and most people connected to the military took the losses in stride -- indeed, few were directly affected. Perhaps more significant, the military is an ordered life with a strong culturally reinforced faith in its mission. The prospect that the President of the U.S. would send soldiers to die for duplicitous political purposes is one that few in the military can fathom. They have a powerful need to believe that their sacrifices are justified, and as such they cling to rationales that those of us not so invested have no trouble discarding. The same sort of thing is true of most of the people who voted for Bush in 2000; conversely, those of us who voted against him have little trouble recognizing that he is a liar, a prig, a coward, a scoundrel, a fool, a fraud, a bloodthirsty little tyrant.

The role of religion in all this isn't obvious. Religion has at best a checkered history, with pious people firmly arrayed on both sides of virtually every issue -- most conspicuously those of war and peace, freedom and equality. The simplest thing that one can say is that religion concentrates conviction, including those that come from non-religious sources. Bush's religion is certainly central to his political success, not so much because any significant number of Americans believe what he believes -- that the state exists to serve the rich, that might makes right, that war is liberating, that freedom comes from the barrel of a gun -- as because we cut the pious a lot of slack. Bush's born again conversion excuses a youth of indolence and destruction, his humility before his rubberstamping God gives him a cloak of ordinariness contrary to his aristocratic privileges, his skill at reducing complex political problems to clearcut moral choices masks his ignorance of causes and arrogance of solutions. For all his signifying, Bush doesn't seem to have much of a religion, but what he does say about it plays well in the Bushwelt, where more often than not religion merely sanctifies fear and loathing.

Throughout history people under stress have turned to religion: for solace, for a haven, sometimes to fight back. Why the Bushwelt should be so stressed isn't obvious. Presumably it isn't the list of impending catastrophes mentioned above -- those are the sort of things that they are neatly isolated from. Nor is terrorism a realistic threat to their world. Rather, they seem to hoard a long litany of grudges. One suspects that the one they find most awkward to talk about (civil rights) is deeply buried at the roots of their angst; that they prefer to vent about homosexuals and "feminazis" is merely more socially respectable. The preachers are very skilled at articulating and exploiting this kind of loathing. Still, even in the Bushwelt religious fervor doesn't go very far. A much broader explanation for their politics is that they detect that their own comfortable status is threatened by an increasingly hostile world everywhere else -- they feel they are targeted by various mixtures of disdain and envy, the urban elites who snub their noses at them and the urban masses who would take what they cannot earn, and the unholy alliance of the two. One reason Bush's explanation of 9/11 resonates so powerfully is that it binds the Bushwelt and Imperial America as one, each taunted by disdain and envy, each determined to survive by imposing our might upon the hostile world.

The big problem with trying to puncture Bushwelt's illusions is that they're probably right. Even if the world isn't exactly out to get them, it seems unlikely that they could sustain their lifestyle indefinitely. Sooner or later the frontier will run out of gas, literally as well as figuratively. Even before that happens the credit could dry up: the U.S. is already the world's worst debtor nation, and Americans are the world's worst debtors. They are likely to run into other problems, but as long as their world remains relatively intact it will be a very difficult task to make an impression on them.

John Kerry lost to Bush by a sufficiently narrow margin that it's easy to point to lots of things that he did wrong or he didn't do right that might have made a difference. He was my least favorite of the four candidates who survived Iowa (I had Dean, Clark, and Edwards ahead of him, in that order), and my gut instinct there seems to have been right: no Massachusetts Democrat was going to have much of a chance. Of course, we don't know how badly the Republicans would have managed to mangle the others. Given the way they handled Kerry the toughest candidate to trip up would have been Clark. But that's assuming that the mission of the Democratic nominee was to out-muscle Bush on the War on Terrorism. Kerry made lots of mistakes -- the line about him starting the campaign by tying his shoelaces together with his Iraq war vote was apropos, but later on he blew it bad when he defended his vote ("knowing what we know now") as the right authorization for a preseident to have, when he could have said that what we know now is not just that Iraq didn't have WMD, but that Bush wasn't a president who could be trusted with a blank check to plunge the country into war. Time and again Kerry came up short: he would criticize Bush's policies and implementations but he never could bring himself to attack Bush personally. The most telling mistake that Kerry made was when he praised Bush's leadership in the days following 9/11. Give him that inch and you give him the election. The facts were that Bush spent most of 9/11 hiding, until his handlers came up with a face and story-line to sell the American people: one that reassured us of our utter lack of responsibility for the attack, and that vowed revenge. He tried to pin the attack on Iraq. He never solved the anthrax events, which evidently came from within the government/military complex. When he did go to war he botched the attack on Al Qaeda, opting for the easier Taliban target and winding up with the basket case that is Afghanistan. He then palmed off that failure as a success to set up an even bigger mess in Iraq. None of which should have been a surprise, given that his acts in the pre-9/11 months not only completely ignored the terrorism threat that had obsessed his predecesor's administration, he had made the terrorists' cause more pressing championing Sharon in Israel and pursuing heavy-handed unilateralism against the rest of the world. Bush's leadership in domestic policies was every bit as flawed: his don't-tax-the-rich program to bankrupt the government, his laissez-faire anti-environmentalism, his industry-written energy program, his giveaways to corporate donors. No president has had a worse first year in office since Herbert Hoover, and Kerry let him off the hook -- blabbering on and on about how he would do a better job of implementing Bush's policies than Bush could do, about how he'd get all that international support, etc. Nothing he said was actually convincing, unless you already realized what a cock up Bush actually was. But the Bushwelt never had a clue, and nothing Kerry said made a dent.

I don't mean to be harsh about Kerry. He ran a competent campaign, and he did a lot of things well. And presumably he had good reasons -- or at least good poll data -- for making the compromises he did. To take one example, I never expected him to criticize Israel, even though Bush's Israel policy is a big part of the problem. In that case I thought he did a good job just to keep quiet and not make matters worse. But in the final analysis he lost, and given his many millions of dollars he's not the guy who's going to wind up paying for his loss. Kerry's loss means four more years with the White House occupied by the enemy. Two more years (probably four) with Congress controlled by the enemy. And God only know how big a hole we just dug in the judiciary. Instead of working on undoing the damage of the last four years, we're stuck now in a rear guard action to limit even more damage. Political disasters happen all over the world, but rarely (if ever) have we been so victimized.

Rebecca Solnit, in one of her recent pieces meant to instill hope about "wild possibilities" said something that I find very unhopeful: she pointed out that the election was won by the guy with the upbeat message. Admittedly, said message is a blatant lie, with only the most fantasy-addled connection to reality. It's a hard enough road to try to convince people about what has gone wrong and what we are putting at risk by pursuing various policies. But we also have to be upbeat about it? That's really going to be tough.

One problem is that even trying to fix various problems is likely to, at least in the short term, make them worse. And it's hard not to get blamed for that. A big case is fairly simple: the U.S. is able to run consistent long-term trade deficits, because the world likes dollars, and capitalists around the world find it attractive to reinvest those dollars in the U.S., mostly because the U.S. is regarded as a safe and lucrative place for capitalist investment. Any effort we make to change tax and regulatory policy will reduce the capital inflows that make up for the trade deficits. If that happens U.S. trade preferences will suffer, and credit status (the U.S. is the world's largest debtor nation) may get hit even worse. These cycles are so deeply embedded that they would crash the U.S. economy. On the other hand surrendering control over public policy to the capitalists causes all sorts of other problems, including long-term impoverishment that will eventually lead to violence and rampant criminality. In the long term those are, I think, bigger problems, but how do you campaign on a program of short-term pain?

I'm far more skeptical that the U.S. actually gets anything very tangible from its militarism and imperialism. Both ship a lot of money abroad without returning much of anything. But in the predatory world of the right-wing's imagination, any cutback entails greater security risks and possible short-term losses. And maybe it is true that many or most of our allies only defer to us because of our military might; given the choice, as happened almost unprecedentedly in the fall of the Soviet Union, they may revolt, which could have lots of serious consequences. For instance, replacing the dollar with the euro as the basis for trade in oil and other commodities would end one of the main reasons foreigners keep dollars.

It's not hard to come with other mixed blessing issues. There are trade-offs on environmental matters, health care, etc. -- taxes being perhaps the most ubiquitous of tradeoffs.

Michael Kinsey used to have this line about Americans being "big babies": that they whine and moan whenever anyone wants them to pay for something or do something, that the expect the world to cater to their every whim, to shower them with flattery, etc. Those sound like the sort of people who would buy into Bush's message of optimism. One might argue that part of the message to them is to grow up. But they're not gonna like it.

Note: The first two parts of this weres actually written in late December 2004, as part of a set of year-end comments to a rock critics poll. The last part was written in early January 2005, as I was finishing the comments. The full version of the comments (most of the rest concern music) is available here.